


Ego Eris

by again_please



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, F/M, Jakku-centric AU, Not-a-Ben-Not-Yet-a-Kylo, Runaway Ben Solo, Scavenger Rey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-06-08 20:01:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6871372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/again_please/pseuds/again_please
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tu fui, ego eris. What you are, I was. What I am, you will be. </p><p>Everyone always thought all Ben Solo really needed was a good knock on the head, but an emergency crash landing on Jakku may not have been the best way to go about getting it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For some reason, I just could not get this idea of an in-between Ben Solo out of my head, and what would happen if he got the chance to experience a clean slate for a little while---"Tabula Rasa" was a considered name for this story, but it's used so often that it just didn't feel like the right way to go. So obviously, I've done some shifting of timelines to suit my own needs here, going on the premise that Ben held out a few years longer with the Jedi. I have not remotely decided on a number of chapters for this story but I hope that you'll bear with me!

As always, no day in the desert is complete without a poorly disguised scam.

 

“Honestly?” Rey says as soon as she hops down from her speeder, voice raised just enough to carry the length of her half-sunken home. She’s not sure whether her would-be attackers are actually  _ inside _ the AT AT or just behind it—and she dearly hopes for the latter—but wherever they are, they ought to hear her loud and clear. 

 

“The old ‘dying traveler’ routine?  _ Really? _ ” she calls again, “Have I given the impression that I was born yesterday?”

 

She’s scanning the dunes now, eyes squinting into the shadows born from the angle of the dying light. Nothing out of the ordinary, no tracks that she can see, save for the pathetically obvious trail leading straight to the collapsed figure lying no more than five paces from the entrance to her living quarters, a crumpled mass of dark-clothed limbs. 

 

The others must’ve brushed their own footprints away, she supposes, or walked single file behind their designated “dead man.” Either would be an unprecedented display of cunning from any of the Niima Outpost riff-raff she deemed most likely to pull this kind of  _ osik _ , and if she weren’t on the receiving end, she might even be impressed. 

 

But she is, and right now she’s starving, moreso than usual, she desperately needs to shake the sand out of her chest wrappings, and after walking away with barely one whole portion to show for the day’s work, this is just  _ not _ what she needs right now, so the quarterstaff comes into her hands a little more quickly than usual.

 

“Alright!” she says, striding forward, coming to a halt just in front of the decoy dead man. “I really  _ haven’t _ got the patience for this right now, so how about you just come out here and we get this over with?” 

 

She knows that she ought to have been expecting this after lugging that set of repaired repulsor coils in for appraisal last week, even though that Blobfish Plutt hadn’t announced his offer of eight ration packs at the top of his lungs like he usually did. People always notice when you pocket more than two or three in one go, no matter how coy you try to be about it. 

 

When no one emerges, she calls out again. “I’d hurry up, if I were you! The going rate for touching any of my stuff is a broken bone per—” 

 

The blood on the sand is what stops her mid-sentence.

 

“Now...now  _ that’s _ some attention to detail,” she tells the prone figure at her feet, though she’s dropped her volume now, and lost most the bravado, too. Warily, she extends her staff and gives him a good prod in the side. No reaction. She tries again, harder, and this time the figure lets out a quiet yet unmistakable  _ groan _ .

 

Oh, blast it all to hell.

 

“No, no, uh-uh, nope,  _ not _ bloody happening—” she storms past her not-quite-dead man and practically kicks in the makeshift door to her living quarters, entering staff-first. “No one in here? Really? You sure?” She knows she sounds more than a bit mad, but she rages back out on to the sand and around the side of her home nonetheless. 

  
  


“Not here either? Hello? HELLO?” She’s shouting at the top of her lungs now, not caring if she brings every thieving piece of junkyard scum within a hundred miles down on her head, as long as it means this isn’t really happening.

 

She’s still holding her staff in front of her defensively when she comes back around front to face the stranger who managed to crawl to  _ her _ humble abode amidst all the thousands of miles of Jakku desert. 

 

“I’m going to turn you over now,” she tells the lump of dark robes, because  _ damn it _ , she can’t just leave him here to die, but at least she’d have known what to do during an attempted robbery. “So—so don’t try anything funny, alright?”

 

Sinking to her knees in the sand beside him, she reluctantly stabs the quarterstaff down out of the way, gets a hold of what she assumes is the figure’s shoulder—hard to tell in the folds of all that cloth, honestly, no wonder he ended up like this—and  _ heaves _ . Rey is no limp worm, but even crumpled into a slight fetal position she can tell he’s uncommonly tall, so much so that she might have been surprised to a see a human face looking back up at her had she not noticed his hands, pale skin red and blistered from exposure. 

 

Saying that he’s looking  _ at _ her might be a bit of a stretch, but listed among the hurried inventory she takes of his face are two dark eyes, the lids to them just barely raised enough to be considered open, fluttering and twitching and working hard to maintain even that position. The rest of it: a prominent nose, broad planes of sand-dulled skin, wide mouth plagued by cracking lips—all of it obscured in dust, dirt, and dried blood. That last one, she assumes, stemming from the not-insignificant wound pounded into his left temple, just above his heavy brow. This is certainly not the extent of his injuries, from the state of him, but a glance tells her that it’s likely the worst of them.

 

He lets out a little, shuddering breath that might also be a groan of pain, or an attempt to speak; the only sign of life he seems capable of generating aside from those fluttering, unfocused eyes.

 

“I’d save that thought, if I were you,” Rey tells him, trying to stay flippant about the whole thing for her own sake, but she can’t help throwing a panicked glance at the disappearing sun. 

 

Even if she got up right this moment and threw him over the back of her speeder like a sack of scrap metal and made for the Outpost to dump him on someone else, the sun would be down by the time she got there, and there are a  _ hundred _ reasons she can think of to steer clear of Niima at night—speeding back over treacherous dunes in the pitch dark being the very least of them. And  _ that’s  _ assuming she could lift him high enough to throw him anywhere at all, this man with a torso roughly the density of a neutron star.

 

All of which means: whether she helps him or not, she’s stuck with the sand-caked oaf until morning.

 

His lips move wordlessly again, and Rey lets out a gusty sigh. 

 

“Let me guess—’water?’” she snipes, mostly to herself, but another glance at that head wound sends an inconvenient pang of guilt through her. The scavengers around here, they like to joke about the off-worlders who can’t seem to survive an afternoon in the desert they’ve been traipsing for years, but from the look of those wounds it’s clear he’s no greenhorn junk trader who simply got himself lost looking to lay eyes on the bones of a warship. That’s real damage he’s taken on, the kind you get from a bad crash or a worse fight.

 

It’s rough out here, especially for a girl alone, but she shudders to think that she’s become callous enough to mock someone in need just because it isn’t convenient for her to help. 

 

After some admittedly superficial inspection, she decides there’s  _ probably _ no way she can degrade his physical state any further just by moving him, so she carefully sits him up, positions herself behind him to take a strategic hold under his arms, and drags him backwards into her meager living space. She’s done it dozens of times for particularly fussy repair jobs that can’t be left out for the winds and sand, and that’s all this really is, she tells herself. Just one  _ hell  _ of a fix.   

 

Cruelty abounds in this desert, but it only multiplies if you let it.   

  
  
  


**

  
  
  


In flashes, all he knows is pain. 

 

Pain is the sky, shining down brilliant fire to ignite the air like the kiln of a workman’s god, every molecule of the universe molten and unfinished and taking shape around him. 

 

It is the ground and all its unforgiving particles, attempting to grate and devour and dragging him lower with every step until he crawls like a common beast. 

 

It is the scream of broken metal, the smell of toxic smoke, the fear of knowing there ought to have been a  _ before _ but remembering nothing, nothing, nothing beyond the most basic facts of his body and spirit; blood, thirst, muscle, bone. In the distance he feels a kind of call, and he drags himself forward, not understanding why any more than he understands why he knows to expand his lungs. Just that the most unbreakable part of him knows to do this to stay alive. 

 

At the end of an eternity, a place of fallen monsters. A fitting place to die. In the distance, he feels a pinprick of light drawing close. 

  
  
  


**

  
  


You don’t survive to be eighteen on Jakku without learning to keep some extra water handy. 

 

Rey doubts that her stranger would be overly thrilled if he knew the source of her surplus, but the animal trough is an excellent place to fill up an extra canteen or three when the usual rations don’t cut it—which is most days, honestly. And she wouldn’t touch the stuff herself if it weren’t for the water purifier she’s rigged so that she can dispense it from an old fuel tank the way she’s seen drinks served on tap in the cantina, kept in the center of the AT AT where it stays coolest by a margin of just a few degrees.

 

The painful gurgling of her stomach demanded that aid and dinner be rendered simultaneously, so the veg-meat sizzles in the makeshift pan behind her as she presses a rag dampened with a very carefully-measured amount of water to the stranger’s temple, gingerly washing blood away from the wound there, out of where it is matted into the dark hairline, off of the skin surrounding, which is surprisingly pale underneath the dirt and grime. You don’t glimpse white like that very often on Jakku, which Rey takes as yet another sign that this man is obviously from off-world. 

 

The head wound is no treat to look at, but it’s beginning to appear less gruesome the more she works on it, moment by moment. Little by little. This is her trick to fixing just about anything, the things so broken that the other scavengers have left them behind, unable to see their worth; the patience to go slow and compartmentalize. 

 

Skin is broken at the surface, but nothing appears to have penetrated any deeper than that. Some kind of blunt force trauma, she thinks, and even though head wounds bleed like crazy the real danger comes from inside with injuries like this. She can disinfect and stitch him up as best she can, but there’ll be no telling what the state of him is until he’s lucid enough to speak. 

 

She relays this to the man, more to break the tension for herself than to keep him apprised of his condition, but his eyelids flutter once more at the sound of her voice which tells her that he hasn’t quite died on her watch just yet.

 

“You need to take in more water,” she tells him, pausing in her efforts to take a bite of her polystarch loaf, which could never rightfully be called  _ bread _ , not really. “I’m sure you could do with something to eat as well, but I’m not sure how well you’ll be able to chew, so I’m adding it to the list of things to worry about once you’re on your….well, maybe not back on your feet, but sitting up, at least.”

 

She dips the small tin she’s using as a sort of ladle into the container of water beside her, murmuring, “Just a few sips, and maybe we can get you...talking…” She trails off in surprise as she goes to slip her other hand under the base of his skull as she’d done earlier when she’d first dragged him inside, to tilt his head up a bit so as not to waste any of the precious little water she has to spare. This time, she finds her efforts mostly unnecessary, his neck muscles straining to raise his head on his own, his mouth finding the edge of the tin she offers him with purpose and drinking deeply. 

 

This unmistakeable sign of life, this tiny little rallying of strength, sends Rey’s heart thundering into her throat, and then into triple time when his half-lidded eyes search the small space in obvious confusion for a moment before connecting with hers. The tin of water now empty, she pulls it away and watches with mixed relief and concern as his mouth works for a few seconds at an obvious attempt to speak, a hundred questions written on his face beneath the dust and dirt. 

 

“You need more water,” Rey says hastily, nerves now speeding up her words. Another dip of the tin and she is pressing it to his lips once more, savoring the few more seconds this action buys her so she can regain her composure. Until this moment, the man has been limp and largely unresponsive, allowing her to set aside the logistics—and potential dangers—of bringing a complete stranger into her home, especially a human male stranger who even lying down appears to be nearly a foot taller than her. 

 

It occurs to her only now that she might have thrown a cloth over his face or something and changed her clothes while he was still out of it. 

 

This time, when he’s finished drinking, Rey lets him croak out the few words he’s working so hard at. 

 

“What—where—” In his voice are the traces of a deeper tone, whittled away to a rasping murmur by dehydration and exhaustion. It’s painful for him to speak, that much would be obvious even without the grimace etched on his features, the set of his jaw.

 

“What happened? I was mostly hoping you could explain that to me, to be honest,” Rey tells him, and she finds that she is keeping her voice low, as though afraid to be overheard. Even speaking at this volume feels almost obnoxiously loud in the confines of this section of the AT AT, no other sound but the wind on the sand outside, now reflecting the jewel-blue of darkening sky. It is, in fact, the first conversation she’s ever had inside her shelter of a home.

 

“Aside from clearly having been crawling about in the desert, your injuries look pretty consistent with a crash of some kind. Some burns, a pretty nasty knock to the head. You might’ve cracked a rib, too, from the way you reacted when I looked through your pockets. I, ah, haven’t gotten around to checking that out yet.”

 

She finds herself flushing in spite of herself and adds, “Not that I was looking to steal anything, mind you. You’ll find your credit chip just where you left it.” 

 

It’s not the idea that her patient might think her untrustworthy that has her cheeks reddening, though. She’d have had to go underneath those robes to get to his ribs—or any other potential injuries hiding under there, though she hadn’t seen any fresh blood in the torso area—and even with everything she’s gone through just to make it through her years alone on this godforsaken planet, undressing a strange man while he was unconscious on her floor felt wildly out of her depth. 

 

Just dragging him indoors and pressing a cloth to his head is more physical contact than she’s  _ ever _ had, outside of not-occasional-enough tussles with fellow Outposters who were either desperate or stupid enough to mistake her staff for a stylish accessory.

 

She breezes on, hoping the scant glow from her handful of solar lights—just a few repurposed hand-lights rigged to illuminate her cooking station and makeshift worktable—is dim enough to hide her brief embarrassment. It’s the last thing she needs, this man thinking she’s some blushing maid when she’s worked all her adolescent years to ensure the men and women of this planet know she’s not to be trifled with.

 

“As for  _ where _ , well, you’re in my home. Dunno where it is you crawled from, but it’s  a few clicks to Niima Outpost from here.”

 

“Niima.” It ghosts out of his mouth, not a question, but devoid of recognition all the same. His next question is careful but Rey can sense the rising panic on the edge of his controlled tone. “Where...is that?”

 

She has been working constantly since bringing him in, even now as she speaks with him; turning to tend to her cooking rations, adjusting the flame, cleaning his wounds, organizing and fiddling with the few supplies that make up her medical kit. But at this question, she stills. 

 

“Jakku,” she tells him slowly.

 

“Jakku.” Voice flat. He has lowered his back to the ground now, visibly tired from the small effort of raising his head to drink, and in the low light Rey can see his eyes flicking all around, landing here and there as though desperate to take in something familiar. Deep shadows have grown on the long landscape of his face. 

 

“Western Reaches?” he asks after a pause, but almost to himself. And he’s right but he’s grasping, hardly more than a guess, like the answer was whispered into his ear rather than dug out from his own stores of knowledge.

 

“Kriff.” She says it quietly, but it’s so obvious now, the burns, the bruises, that awful head wound, his trail in the sand leading in from the true wastelands, nothing out there but distance and death. “You crashed. I was thinking you had a run in with some unfriendlies, maybe a speeder wreck, but...no. You crashed a ship out there, didn’t you?.”

 

“I...I don’t know.” He’s looking past her, voice small like a child’s, almost afraid to meet her eyes.

 

“You don’t  _ know _ ?” she gapes. “I’d think I’d remember something like that, if it were me.”

 

“I…” dry throat cracks, tongue darts out to lick the lips in vain. “I couldn’t...there was so much pain, I just...I don’t know.” Eyes still searching, clearly afraid. 

 

“Alright,” she hastens to try and soothe his distress, putting out a hand that she’s not quite sure she has a destination for, hovering in the empty but small space between them as one might reach to calm an animal. His eyes snap to it in alarm, and she withdraws. “One thing a time. What  _ do _ you remember?”

 

More agonized silence. Those dark brows, dirtied with blood and grit, squeezing together as though trying to exert a physical force on the mind below.

 

“You were probably knocked unconscious by whatever forced you down. You might not have seen it coming,” she reassures him. 

 

There was a time she’d been repelling down the inside of one of the Destroyers; she always checked to make sure her fibercord was secure, but something had given way, a rusted bolt, ancient welding eaten away by the ravages of wind and sand and time. She didn’t remember the fall, only finally stirring some time later, a whole section metal piping the length of her body beside her and a headache like a roaring sandstorm between her ears. “It’s not unusual—” 

 

“You don’t understand,” he tells her. “I don’t  _ know  _ what happened. I can’t remember”

 

“Nothing?” she asks, knowing it won’t really do any good to push him, but she’s never fixed anything without examining all the pieces first, and she isn’t about to change that procedure now. “Where you were headed? Where you were coming from?”

 

His silence alludes to something even worse than what she’s imagining. “Your  _ name _ ?” she demands. 

 

And at this, he finally speaks, the words only barely escaping a jaw clenched so tight, it can only be adding to his pain. The angular planes of his face contort with anguish, an inward fury, and for a moment, Rey is glad of the injuries that weaken him, keep him safely immobilized on her floor. He raises himself back up to his elbows, desperate to be understood.

 

“I. Can’t.  _ Remember! _ ”

 

And as though this explosion of his voice is a physical force, everything within a three foot radius  _ rockets _ away from them. Sand and tools and medical supplies hit the metal sides of the AT AT, the tin of water clatters against the wall with her seemingly endless tally of days scratched with painstaking care, and even Rey herself topples backwards from where she’d been sitting on her knees, letting out a screech of shock and pain as she catches herself on her elbow, her other arm hitting the hot edge of her cooking pan and sending the contents to the ground. 

 

She’s sitting up before she’s even had a chance to process the last few seconds through the proper parts of her brain, and so she’s left addressing all hundred or so thoughts at once—simultaneously looking for the weapon he obviously must have drawn and wondering how she’d missed it in her search, or how she’d missed him going for it—and yet what kind of weapon does  _ that _ , not one she’s ever seen—and scrambling for her staff—cursing the fresh burn gracing the skin below her wrist—and oh Maker, the water, the  _ food _ —got to strike back first—but she’s got to get away—

 

And it all comes to a screeching halt when she gets a good look at the man’s face, chalk-white in obvious terror before something changes in his eyes. They hold her own for a few seconds, panicked and wild and black with blown-out pupils, before losing focus, sliding up, and then eyelids going slack. 

 

He collapses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading this first chapter! Comments, suggestions, criticisms always appreciated.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I didn't mean to dwell QUITE so long in Rey's house, but the two of them just would not stop sizing each other up. They'll be on the move in the next chapter, this I promise you. If Rey can get him standing on his own two feet again, that is.

He wakes to a view down the length of the girl’s staff, the blunt end hovering hardly a finger’s width from the tip of his nose. It’s not a sharpened weapon, nor does it appear to be equipped for shooting of any kind, but the thing still looks fairly lethal in her unwavering grip, not a single muscle twitch shifting her aim off of her intended target even for a fraction of a second.

 

His head full of what feels like loose rocks, he makes an attempt at drawing his head back away from the threat just the slightest bit. While the girl’s grip seems to be firm, her face is wild with fear, and he hears the shakiness of the breath she expels through her nose.

 

“Sorry,” is all he can think to croak out.

 

Apparently it’s the wrong thing to say, because the tip of the staff comes even closer still, pressing the cartilage of his nose down—gently, but with the promise of pain should he make a sudden movement. A rather frivolous concern, he thinks, especially if she’d really examined his injuries like she said. Just lying here, he’s certain the fastest movement he’s capable of right now is a sneeze. 

 

And even that might be the end of him.

 

“What did you do?” she demands, looking him over furiously. “I specifically searched you for weapons and found none. What have you got? Some kind of….concealed self-defense pulse?”

 

“I don’t know,” he growls. Admittedly, this looks bad, but he honestly hadn’t  _ tried _ to do anything. He’d been so frustrated, and he’d been reaching inside himself for answers with such desperation, and it had just...happened. “If there’s a way I caused that reaction, I can’t explain it.”

 

The girl regards him warily for another moment. It’s clear by now that she doesn’t know him, has probably never laid eyes on him before in her life, and the sinking feeling in his stomach at that realization is enough to add “horrible nausea” to his extensive list of ailments. When he’d first come to, the way she’d been tending to him had made him think—hope, really—that she knew him in some way, that she’d be able to place him in some larger context that would trigger the pathways of his brains to trace their familiar routes and give him  _ something _ to go on. 

 

And besides that hope, something about her had just seemed...right. But his brains are addled, after all. 

 

There is one small upside to not knowing the girl, he thinks, at that’s that it means he doesn’t live in this hovel with her.

 

“What’s your name?” he asks, at the same time she spits, “Get out.”

 

A beat of almost amused silence, and she adds, “And  _ don’t _ say ‘that’s a funny name.’” 

 

“I can’t get up,” he says, trying not to resort to pleading just yet. He might not even be able to picture his own face, but he knows he has some dignity left in this battered body. “Not without help. You know I can’t. There’s nothing I can do to you.”

 

“Except blow up my house.”

 

“I apologize for that,” he says, a little bit tightly, and feels proud of himself for not adding,  _ not that you can really call this a house.  _ It would be an awful thing to say, especially considering that her “house” is the only thing standing between him and certain death in the desert, and how certain can he be that he has anything better to call home? He’s a little shocked at the ungratefulness of the thought, but another part of him is secretly thrilled at this small insight into himself. 

 

So, he’s a bit of an asshole. That’s something. 

 

“---and,” he goes on, “I don’t even know that I  _ did _ anything at all.”

 

“So I should keep you here knowing that you might blow like an unstable thermal detonator at any moment?”

He meets her glare as evenly as is possible with seemingly every nerve in his body shooting pain signals at once. “You don’t  _ have  _ to keep me anywhere, but I’m not the one who dragged me in here. If you want me gone, you’ll have to drag me back out yourself.”

 

The girl’s expression enters a realm beyond fury for a moment, and he braces himself for a blow to the face as her grip on the staff finally shifts—but she’s lowering it, he realizes quickly, not raising it for an attack.   

 

“You’re gone come morning,” she tells him, turning her back to him and beginning to address the mess he’d caused. “I don’t care if I’ve got to strap you to the speeder like a load of cargo. If you’re lucky, a ship with a med bay will dock in the Outpost in the next few days. You haven’t got squat besides that credit chip, and ship crews are about the only people who deal in credits around here.”

 

He’s not quite sure what to say to that. In theory, it sounds like a fair deal, considering that he’s a perfect stranger to her and she’s already gone out of her way to reel him in from the brink of death. But there’s no mistaking her opinion of this Outpost in the tone of her voice. 

 

Choosing for this moment not to dig himself in any deeper, he stays silent and watches her work.

  
  


She begins to pick her way through the smattering of debris on her knees, pausing to touch her hand to the dark stain on the opposite wall. The cup of water splattered its contents down the seemingly infinite number of lines carved there, and she brings her hand away from the quickly-evaporating patch of moisture. She touches that same hand once to her lips, and then briefly to the sides of her neck just below each ear, the way one might dab on perfume, before bending at the waist to collect her scattered supplies.     

 

He’s not sure what experience he has with perfume, or watching people apply it, and so the image it conjures is oddly faceless, timeless, spaceless. How can he know something but not remember how he knows it? It makes the inside of his mind feel vast and dark, an alien galaxy unmapped. Safer to focus on the moment at hand. 

 

The odd piece of green meat that he saw knocked to the ground during his little episode appears to have made its way back into the pan while he was unconscious, and he holds back a grimace as she finally turns off the flame and slides it out and into a bowl. Even with no concept of his own past, his own upbringing, her situation seems abnormally impoverished. Watching her scrape some unrecognizable form of nutrients out of a curved shard of metal, the sun-bleached cloth of her clothes gaping loosely in places around her lean frame, gives him a deep twinge of both guilt and disappointment. 

 

His stomach lets out a rather alarming scream of protest, interrupting the quiet sounds of the girl’s chewing.

 

Though he doesn’t dare ask for some relief for his hunger, both out of respect for the obvious scarcity of her supplies and a little wariness of the green substance, she chews with her back to him for another moment before reaching for the bowl on the table beside her. She steps over one of the protruding metal ridges on the floor and disappears into an unlit corner of the space, deeper into the body of the monster. When she returns, a shallow glimmer of water sloshes around inside, and with the rip of a packet and a little work, she’s handing him the same kind of grayish lump of bread he’d noticed her munching on earlier.

 

“Don’t let that one go airborne,” she says, but it feels like more of an actual warning than an admonition.

 

He thanks her, and tries to infuse his syllables with the proper amount of sincerity that the situation demands, but a deeper instinct is keeping his voice gruff, words clipped, unable to prostrate himself fully before her the way he knows he probably should. She merely nods, retreating as far back as she can get from him without disappearing altogether, busying her hands with some odd contraption she picks up from where it sits on the floor—the innards of one of the many half-broken machine components lining her home, no doubt. 

 

“If—when—I can get to someone who can access to my credit chip, I’ll repay you,” he forces himself to say. “For everything.”

 

She’s silent for a beat, but he thinks he sees her cheek twitch. “Forgive me if I don’t count those eggs right away.”

 

“Here’s hoping I’m an intergalactic billionaire.” He raises the totally unappealing loaf in a mock toast and sinks his teeth in. 

 

The thing tastes pretty much just how it looks, like baked sand, but to his depleted stomach it’s a feast he’d gladly sit for a hundred courses. And it’s not like he could name something he’d prefer, after all.

 

When he meets eyes with the girl again, the look on her face gives him a quiet jolt of alarm, until the dormant part of his brain that controls his social prowess awakens slowly and recognizes it for what it is; the kind of deep, twisted grimace that indicates a poorly restrained smile.

 

Her attempt at a recovery is to attack her machine part with renewed vigor. “I admit I’ve never met an  _ intergalactic billionaire _ before, but none of the rich people I’ve ever seen around here travel alone. If you had that kind of money, you’d probably have an entourage of about thirty people specifically employed to make sure neither you nor anyone else forgets how rich you are.”

 

“Even so, perhaps you ought to give me your name so I know who I’m transferring my funds to,” he probes once more. 

 

He knows that so far he’s done exactly nothing to warrant her trust, but sitting here for this long not even knowing his  _ own _ name feels like a scream has been building up in his chest since the moment he woke up from that crash, and she can’t possibly understand what it means to withhold this information from him, to deny him a name and a history for the only solid thing in his universe right now.

 

“I wouldn’t bother,” she says, somewhat more self-consciously than anything else he’s heard her say—and it’s  _ still not a name kriffing hell don’t lose it don’t lose it just SAY it already— _ and eyes still on her work, she adds, “They don’t give accounts and credit chips to junk scavengers like me. Defeats the purpose, paying us in currency we can save up.” She lifts her gaze for a moment, and looks surprised to see him looking back at her, rather than continuing to devour her donated meal.

 

“I’m Rey,” she says finally. His silence is a question, expecting a surname, and her look hardens again just the slightest bit. She provides no further answer. 

 

He’s faring just about as well talking to her as he did crawling in the desert. Accepting his brush-off, he goes to pick at one of the crumbs that has fallen down his front while eating—but the spike of pain triggered by this minute rotation of his torso leaves him breathless, and he’s off his elbows and flat on his back once again without even feeling the impact. Rey is at his side in another blink, her mouth pressed into a thin line.

 

“Alright,” she tells him, a little breathless now herself, and it almost sounds like she’s mustering up her  _ own _ nerve rather than his, which isn’t an amazing feeling. “We need to examine that before it becomes a rib jutting into your lung.”

 

“What if it already is?” he asks, trying to reassure himself that he’s lived this long so far under her care.

 

“Trust me, you’d know.”

 

“Are you—some kind of healer?” he gasps the last part just a little bit as she helps him maneuver one shoulder out of the sleeve of his robe, and she gives him a look that might be saying,  _ would you like to wait here while I go get one? _

 

He has to help her navigate his odd choice of clothes, and it’s the first time he’s thought to investigate them. He remembers clawing off a belt in desperation as he dragged himself away from the wreckage of what must have been his ship, as the wide cut of stiff leather had dug into his damaged torso in exactly the wrong spot, but remaining on him now is a rough-hewn vest of sorts, loose over a tunic of the same material, wrapped and tied to one side, both a deep, dark brown. Below that, an undershirt of a similar cut and color, the neck of it gaping open slightly just below the hollow of his throat. 

 

When Rey gets to that undershirt, she spares him the ordeal of sitting up and simply lifts the bottom hem of it up towards his chest, exposing the lower half of his torso to the air, which has now becoming surprisingly cool, considering how the daylight nearly burned him alive.

 

“Good news,” she tells him. “Nothing’s outside that ought to be in.”

 

“Bad news?” he says, jaw and neck straining to let him peek down the length of his own body without triggering the pain.

 

“That much bruising could definitely be a fracture.” She lays a hand over the left side of his ribcage, where he can feel the damage is. Her touch is feather-light, but he can still feel the callouses lining the top of her palm, the tips of her slender fingers. Sweat begins to bead at his temples, knowing what’s coming.

 

“Sorry for this,” she says, her eyes finally alighting on his for a brief moment. He has a split second to wonder at the slight color gathering high around her cheekbones before the pressure of her fingers increases  _ just _ slightly—and then he’s staring at the ceiling again, startled both by the shock of pain and the strangled yell that escapes his throat with no permission at all.

 

“ _ Are you trying to kill me faster?” _ he demands, and at the incredulous, slightly murderous look on her face, lowers his eyes to see that he has the wrist of her offending hand snatched up in his grip, so tight that his knuckles have lost what little color they have, bone straining sickly white against his skin.

 

He releases the vice of his fingers at once, and Rey jerks her arm back, cradling it against her own chest. “No break,” she tells him, voice accusing. 

 

That can’t be possible, he thinks, but she’s tugging his shirt back down and away from him in another instant, wandering back into the darkened corner she’d disappeared into for water. Panting slightly, he tracks her with his eyes, desperately confused. 

 

“How can that—” he begins, and she speaks without looking at him again. 

 

“I know what a broken rib feels like. Had one or two myself. Plus, you’d have screamed  _ much _ louder.” She emerges with a tiny, tiny bottle of opaque brown glass clutched in her hand, and kneeling beside him, unscrews the cap and gently picks up his right hand from where it lays at his side. From the bottle, she pours a minuscule amount of what looks like wood chips into the cup of his palm.

 

“Chew. Don’t swallow,” she instructs, capping the bottle once more. “It’s bruising. Certainly not fun, but an actual break or fracture would be much worse. It’ll be painful to do...just about anything, but you’re not looking at any long-term damage.  _ Chew _ ,” she emphasizes again, and he reluctantly pops the palmful of wood shavings into his mouth, cringing at the sensation of crushing the substance between his molars.

 

“That should start to take the edge off the pain in a few minutes. It’s all I would have been able to do for you even if it  _ was _ a break, unfortunately,” she explains while he munches mutely, unable to disguise the grimace on his face. He braces himself as she steps over him, but she’s careful not even to step on the folds of the robe now spread beneath his back, her steps light even in her obvious exhaustion, and he turns his head to follow her, watching her lower herself into a canvas hammock that looks like it hasn’t been quite big enough for her for several years now.

 

Rey reaches up, fiddling with one of the handlights suspended above her sleeping area until the dim glow cuts out. The two other lights in the space go dark as well, as though connected on a circuit. The darkness is not complete, the interior still illuminated by the blue glow of night entering through the porthole leading outside, the smattering of tiny, ragged holes, the evidence of years of exposure to the desert winds. 

 

“Try and get some rest,” she murmurs from her place above him. “We’re both going to need it.”

 

But he lies there in silence for nearly an hour, unable to stop looking at those punctures in the metal, imagining being hunkered in here alone against the roar of a storm, sand and rock pouring in through every unsealed crack. 

  
  


**

  
  


In his dream, he walks an unfamiliar hall of smooth, dark stone. His footsteps echo into the blackness stretching before him.

 

_ Lost again? _ Rumbles a voice that sounds as though it comes from everywhere—within him, before him, above him. It turns his blood cold, yet at the same time he begins to advance more quickly down the hall, as though he must prove the speaker wrong.

 

“Where are you?” he barks, finding no end to the passageway, only more identical expanses of stone. “How do I get back? How do I remember?”

 

_ It matters not. You have only ever needed my guidance. I shall find you again, as I found you before. There is no concealing you from me for long. _

 

He walks more quickly still, and beneath him the stone becomes metal, a bridge extending over a gaping abyss, each step causing the walkway to rattle ominously. Behind him, a voice once more fills the air, harsher than the first, more solid, and yet somehow, pleading.

 

_ BEN! _

 

But when he turns to look, he is still alone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm probably not the only one who imagines Jedi Ben Solo taking up his [grandaddy's style of darker robes.](http://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2014/02/4-Anakin.jpg) Only, sans the black leather. Be a little less obvious, Anakin.
> 
> The stuff Rey gives Ben is meant to be similar to willow bark.
> 
> Many thanks for reading again c:


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I'm awful. I'm so sorry about that wait, and I wish I had some fabulous excuse but it's really just that I work full time and sometimes I just don't have it in me after work to sit down and look at more words on a screen, since my job boils down to reading other people's writing for 8 hours a day. And yes, I'm properly ashamed that after all that time this is still about the same length of my other chapters, but I figured I should just get to a stopping point and post SOMETHING. 
> 
> And I'll just let you get to it now, shall I?

At first light, Rey finally allows herself to give up the pretense of rest. 

 

Sleep has always fought hard to elude her, a vestige of her earliest days alone in the desert when she was easier prey, so reluctant to close her eyes that she often fell asleep sitting up with her back to a wall and a weapon across her lap. Every gust of wind was an incoming sandstorm, every distant engine belonging to the ship meant to take her home. 

 

Even now, while enjoying a certain level of protection afforded to her by reputation, the chatter of her thoughts has taken up the cause of keeping her awake most nights. She’s used to spending an hour or two daydreaming before she can even slip into her first round of restless dreams, maybe catching four or five hours of real rest on a good night.

 

She would not categorize a volatile amnesiac giant passed out on her floor as a “good night.”

 

She can’t help it; she has to take a moment to stare at him, hating the apparent ease with which he lies there totally undisturbed by the the sounds of her movement as she steps over him to begin preparing for her day.

 

And moreover, that he can lie there like a switched-off droid  _ now _ when she’s good and properly awake, as if he wasn’t twitching about and mumbling crazily to himself the whole night long. She’d been forced to snatch sleep in half-hour increments, alternately lying paralyzed with the fear that he would wake up in a violent panic and peering at his pale face in the darkness over the edge of her hammock, afraid he might be near death with fever from all his uncontrollable shivering and the worrying sheen of sweat upon his brow.

 

Of course, he seems alright  _ now _ .

 

His eyes open abruptly and Rey nearly jumps back, unsure of how long she’d let her eyes linger on him, searching for some new sign of distress or injury. However long he’d kept her awake, she knows his night couldn’t have been any more restful.

 

“...Morning,” she she says on reflex, somewhat awkwardly. Watching him blink sleep out of his dark eyes and raise one broad palm to scrub blearily at his face seems like far too intimate a moment to witness, wholly unguarded, unposed. 

 

Abruptly, she realizes that she hasn’t put her hair up in its usual configuration yet, scraped back into three buns that ensure each separate section of hair stays where it ought to be. Rey seizes the loose hair hanging around her face, holding it in a loose bunch at the nape of her neck while she grabs for her hair ties with the same urgency of someone who’s just realized the front of their clothing is gaping open.

 

“Any chance you had a miraculous recovery overnight?” she asks briskly, turning away from him to secure her hair. For some reason, she finds it much harder to do this while being watched, and drops the middle loop twice before it finally holds. The sooner she’s got him on the back of her speeder heading off to Niima, the better. 

 

“I think my name is Ben.”

 

The reply makes her whirl around. He looks infinitely serious, obviously miles away in his own thoughts, and Rey feels another pinch of guilt for tossing off such a flippant question.

 

“Are you serious? How do you know?” She has to stop herself from swooping down on him to shine a light into his ear or something, fascinated as though he were an engine that had unexpectedly started back up in spite of needing extensive repairs.

 

Now that he—Ben now, not just  _ he _ , how odd—is awake, his restless night is even more apparent, etched into his drawn face. Purple shadows have gathered under his eyes, and he has a haunted look about him, as though it were not just the fever and injuries he’d had to battle through the night.

 

“A...a dream,” he manages, voice gravelly with sleep. “I heard a man shouting.”

 

“And he said your name was Ben?”  

 

He has yet to meet her gaze, his eyes tracking back and forth as though still in the dream.

 

“I couldn’t see him, but it felt like he was calling to me. It felt...real.”

 

“You remember anything else?” Rey asks, to no reply. He’s only half with her.

 

“Funny,” she says, after a moment. “You don’t look much like a Ben.”

 

This seems to drag him the rest of the way back into the waking world. His brows join in confusion as he locks eyes with her. “I don’t?”

 

“No,” Rey tells him simply. 

 

“And what is a  _ Ben _ supposed to look like, exactly?” He actually looks a little offended, as though her opinion on the matter might have the power to take back this hard-won snippet of identity. She has to restrain a snort of laughter. 

 

“I dunno,” she says. “Just not like you, I suppose. Come on, we ought to get ready to head out. You think you can stand?”

 

“I—hang on a second,”  _ Ben  _ demands, and she’s not sure why she’s teasing him like this, she really isn’t, but it’s better than letting him descend back into those nightmares that robbed  _ both _ of them of rest for a second time. Rey grabs her pack and opens the fraying-edged flap to extract her canteen, filling it halfway—her usual allotment for the day—before throwing her guest an appraising look over her shoulder, gritting her teeth, and filling it up the rest of the way. 

 

He looks ready to argue, but as she steps back towards him capping her canteen tightly, the petulance seems to evaporate right off his face, leaving him looking utterly staggered. Rey halts, wondering if she’s about to have to drop to her knees and resuscitate him, before his eyes light on something beside her.

 

“The helmet,” he says, bewilderingly, and she’s not entirely sure a blood vessel in his brain hasn’t just burst when he repeats it once again, patience totally lost in the three seconds she’d stared at him incomprehensibly. “The  _ helmet!” _ he snaps, stretching out an arm to gesture at it in exasperation.

 

Rey realizes that he means for her to hand him the battered Rebel flight helmet he’s spotted to her right, resting under a rickety metal shelf she’d bolted to the wall. She snatches it up protectively on a reflex, clutching it to her chest, unsure whether she’s more horrified at the prospect of handing over one of her most prized possessions or at his utter lack of manners.

 

“ _ Please _ ,” he strains, apparently realizing his lack of tact, but  _ very _ grudgingly. If he could easily lunge for it, she’s sure there would have been no amendment. “The visor,” he adds, “It’s the only reflective surface in here.”

 

Oh.  _ Oh.  _ Rey feels color rise in her face, and  _ stars _ , how is it that an entire adolescence of training her blood vessels not to respond to raucous shouts from strangers has totally evaporated in under twelve hours? Certainly he could have conducted himself a little better, but under the circumstances, a little impatience is to be expected.

 

“You have no idea what you look like,” she realizes, aloud. “I’m—I’m sorry,” she says, voice choked a little with embarrassment as she kneels to bring the helmet towards him, and the agitation on his face morphs into a kind of shock at her shift into remorse—or perhaps at her sudden closeness. She offers the helmet to him, and he fits his hands around it carefully, watching Rey closely as though afraid she might jerk it away from him in another abrupt swing of mood. 

 

He looks down at it without yet tilting the visor up to reflect his own face. 

 

“You’re not hideously deformed, or anything,” she tells him, voice a little brighter, but still gentle, “Totally normal face. Even a bit...er...well, once you’re cleaned up a bit….” She’s forced to watch as Ben’s eyebrows ascend into the heavens as she shoves her foot deeper and deeper into her mouth with each new, meandering word. Kriff, what is she on about, talking about his  _ looks _ ? 

 

“...I mean, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she finishes lamely.

 

He regards her for another second before wiping some dirt from the visor with his sleeve and holding it level with his gaze. Rey realizes too late that perhaps this ought to be a private moment, but his expression doesn’t change much as he observes himself for the first time, brow furrowed sternly as he turns his head from side to side. If he’s pleased or displeased with what he finds, he doesn’t show it. Gingerly, one hand comes up to graze the wound at his temple. 

 

Rey stands, wiping palms on her pant legs, unable to intrude on this bizarre reunion any longer. “You’ll see better outside, I imagine.” The sun has crept a little higher, the bluish early morning giving way to red and orange, promising to burn off the night’s chill and restore the blistering daylight in just under an hour.

 

Ben sets the helmet down beside him now, his face carefully guarded.

 

“Do you think you can get out on your own, or should I…?” Rey asks, lingering by the porthole entrance. She’s not sure that dragging him outside, now fully conscious and rather tetchier than he ought to be with the person who’d saved his life, would be quite as harmless as dragging him inside had been.

 

He seems to share this sentiment. Rey watches as he grits his teeth fiercely, maneuvering himself until he comes to rest on his knees, refusing to let out even a grunt of pain for the effort it takes him. Even so, he sounds as drained as a man after a full day’s work when he finally replies, “I can manage.”

 

She ducks outside ahead of him, not fully agreeing with that conclusion, but not about to delay his exit from her home by one more minute’s worth of arguing. He struggles through the small doorway on his hands and knees, jaw clenched tight. Finally coming to rest on his knees in the sand once more, he presses one hand to the bruised side of his ribs, head down as he tries to regain his composure. 

 

“I may...I may need some assistance,” he admits, between ragged breaths.

 

Simple enough; yet as she approaches him Rey feels as though she’s never once thought about how to move her limbs properly, or what she ought to be doing with her hands. She decides on offering them to him palms-up with forearms angled down to reach him, and apparently it’s an acceptable gesture, because he grasps her below the elbows without a moment of hesitation. 

 

Something about the way his hands wrap easily around the width of her arms makes her realize that his head is actually a lot higher up than she’d expect for someone on his knees, but before she’s had even a second to process this, his weight comes down on her. She hauls as much of it up as she can, and then there he is, towering nearly a full head above her. 

 

“Alright?” she asks, when he doesn’t release her arms immediately.

 

He blinks. “You’re shorter than I realized.”

 

If she was expecting anything, it wasn’t that. She tugs free of his grip and decides not to respond, finding her arsenal of quick comebacks and parting shots unsuited to such an unusually harmless comment. Instead she heads over to her parked speeder to secure her bag and staff, giving it a cursory once-over to make sure no thieves have somehow overcome the nasty little electric shock that awaits anyone who lays a hand on the thing without her permission. She never usually sees anyone this far out from town, but you never know when people get desperate. 

 

A glance over her shoulder shows Ben still standing right where she left him. 

 

“Will that thing even hold two passengers?” he asks, eyeing it from afar as though she’d trotted out an old wheelbarrow she meant for them to take turns pushing each other in. 

 

Rey frowns. That  _ thing? _ Sure, the chassis may be bit scuffed up, and every now and then one of the twin engines fails, but it’s not like  _ he _ knows that.

 

“I’m sorry, your  _ Highness _ , I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says, rolling her eyes as she plants one foot on the side of the speeder to pull the strap securing her cargo net taut. “Feel free to wait here for your escort fleet.” And then, cutting him a look, “There’s room, unless you’re shy.”

 

He looks as if she lost him three words in. “Are you having a stroke?” she asks, striding back to him. That’s something that can happen with a head injury, right? 

 

“What did you call me?” he asks, and it’s hard, Rey thinks, to know when he’s being difficult and when he might have actually lost his basis for her reference somewhere in the depths of his mind. 

“It was a joke,” she says. “Your Highness. You know, like what you call royalty.” 

 

“I know, it just sounded….” he trails off. “Familiar, I suppose.” 

 

Just another mystery for him to live with, she supposes. With a twinge, she has to acknowledge that dropping him in Niima with little more than the clothes on his back and a possibly-useless credit chip is not exactly the height of altruism, but for kriff’s sake, what is she supposed to do? Keep dividing up the rations that she herself barely lives on until he’s healed?  _ If _ he heals? Go find his crashed ship out in the middle of the desert and spend a month’s labor restoring it for someone who doesn’t even remember how to fly? Who might never remember? Who might one day, instead, remember a life of crime or cruelty and not hesitate to start again? 

 

Rey tries not to stare at him too transparently. She’d like to imagine that one can tell these things about a person, but all too well, she knows that imagining is good for little more than a few moments of manufactured peace. It provides its own kind of sustenance, but it won’t fill your stomach, nor stop a dagger from entering your back. 

 

Still, she’s always been good at reading people, and something about him just feels…well, maybe not  _ good _ . But definitely compelling. And someone like her would never be compelled by something bad. Would she?

 

It takes some effort between the two of them to get Ben on the back of the speeder, but they’re soon both seated. The motions of starting up the engines, of guiding the craft over the familiar dunes and valleys around her home with scarcely a glance the the perceptor readout warning her of obstructions and unsafe changes in altitude, the give and take of balancing her top-heavy machine; these are all as natural to Rey as walking on her own two feet. And yet, she allows herself to be drawn in, trying to lose herself in the constant adjustments of flight to distract herself from the wall of body pressed tightly against her back. 

 

This is survival in Jakku. Constant adjustments.

  
  


**

 

Rey has always parked her speeder just outside of town for a handful of reasons. 

 

For one thing, no one appreciates having engines roar up too close to the market stalls, spewing dust and noise, unwelcome guests in the already crowded aisles. For another, what safety you  _ think _ you gain by keeping your vehicle in sight is almost completely canceled out by the fact that it’s in everyone  _ else’s _ sight as well. Leaving it on the outskirts is far less likely to attract unwanted attention, whether it’s her cargo or herself she’s trying to smuggle in unnoticed. 

 

In this case, it’s both.

 

As Rey eases the speeder to a stop just beyond the first ramshackle little structure, a few heads turn; a handful of fellow scavengers unloading meager hauls from carts or beasts of burden. Rey knows their faces, but there are no real friends among the people of Niima, few attachments that can be called anything but a temporary alliance. This is not a place for neighbors.

 

People are careful here, have learned not to react to anything besides food or scrap being ripped out of their hands, lest the wrong person notice you noticing them. If they even recognize Rey, much less register the stranger astride the seat behind her, she can’t tell. Even so, she twists in her seat to regard him over her shoulder for a moment.

 

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let on to anyone that you stayed last night with me,” she murmurs, doing to best to toss it off casually, as if she were remarking on the weather, but she sees his brows come together in confusion. They’ll stick like that some day, she’s sure of it. 

 

“It...could make things difficult for me, if the wrong people got the wrong idea,” she explains, but still no comprehension appears on his face, and honestly, she thinks understands for the first time that sentiment she’s overheard a dozen times, listening to groups of older women as they scrub sand at the workstations.  _ Men. They don’t understand anything.  _ Is he really going to make her spell this out for him?

 

“Look, just— _don’t_ , alright?” Rey huffs. “Or do. Whatever. I’ll deal.” She dismounts roughly and shoulders her pack, plucking her staff out of the cargo netting. She almost turns to go before she remembers— _oh, right, his grievous injuries_ —but to her surprise Ben slides from the seat before she can even offer a hand, with only a nominal amount of wincing and a small grunt. He stoops just the slightest bit as he begins to walk, but his limp is much less pronounced. It’s a little painful just to look at him moving like that, having seen the bruising up close and recalling the ghosts of her own, old pains.

 

“You’re certainly taking it on the chin,” she comments as she begins to lead the way into Niima, approaching the perimeter of tented stalls at an unhurried pace. No need to rush, she supposes, now that her own home is safe from him and his literally explosive temper. “That, or you’re slowly losing sensation below the neck.”

 

Ben cuts her a look as he falls into step at her side. 

 

“After your expert care? Nonsense,” he deadpans. For the briefest moment, she halts, about to whirl on him with fire in her eyes and  _ I only sheltered and fed you and saved your life, but go on, keep snarking— _ but then she catches the careful way he watches her from the corner of his eye, the slant of his mouth held unnaturally still. And then she realizes.

 

In her defense, she’s fairly certain she’s never been teased before. 

 

Mocked, certainly;  _ jeered _ at more than a few times; outright insulted on the regular. But teased? A shocked little laugh escapes from her, hardly more than a puff of air. Ben’s mouth twists against a smile in response to the sound, and Rey can’t help but notice how his features struggle to fit into amusement like old clothes that he’s outgrown. Someone his size must have outgrown quite a lot over the years, she thinks.

 

She shakes off her smile as they cross into view of the nearest stalls, her whole stance shifting into her usual patrol mode as her boots begin to crunch the dirt of the Outpost, years of Jakku sand pounded gritty and compact. In the shifting dunes she can be the the strength of her back, the dextrous skill of her fingers, the quick workings of her mind, the sharp accuracy of her eyes. In Niima, she is no more than what she holds in her hands.

 

“Well. Best be off,” she says tightly, looking straight ahead, doing her utter best to not actually look like she’s talking to him. People pretend like they don’t notice things, but gossip is the second form of currency here in Niima, and Rey certainly doesn’t intend to fatten any purses today.  _ Did you see Unkar’s pet? With that human man? Never seen him around here before. Looked awful friendly, those two. You know what they say about those human girls. I heard it wasn’t just him. Seems like she’s found another way to earn her rations. _

 

She aims an arm in the direction of the long field of hard-packed dirt that passes for their spaceport. “That way for you. Keep your head down for a bit, see if you can pick out one of the ship captains. They’ll be the ones heading straight for the cantina while the rest of the crew works.”

 

Any fleeting worry about him carrying on with some profuse display of gratitude and promises to repay her kindness proves to be a baseless fear. Ben only stares off in the direction she indicated, his eyes as hard as the horizon. She’s envious, a little, of the way he can completely close off his face so that it gives nothing away, and of the way his imposing stature backs up that stony look without need of a demonstration. Indeed, he is so perfectly walled off that you’d never guess just from looking at him—visible injuries aside—what hell he has been through, nor that he has almost nothing to guide him forward save for a guess at a name. Nothing about him betrays uncertainty or fear.

 

...So why can she suddenly feel it like a frigid aura around him, rolling off him in waves so thick that she’s surprised his breath doesn’t cloud the air like a cold night? 

 

What Rey doesn’t know about this man could fill a thousand databases, could take a thousand lonely little girls a thousand years of lonely nights to read and read and read and still never reach the end. But what she does know is this: she can’t afford to care this much. 

 

“Take care of yourself,” she mumbles, and doesn’t dare chance a look back as she pushes her legs to create distance between them. Distance, that familiar first defense of a girl just trying to survive. But even as she wades ten, twenty, fifty,  _ a hundred _ paces into the dusty crowds with the sun beating down on her brow and back, the chill of his fear never fully leaves her; it only settles deeper into the island in her heart, the place where she keeps all things that cannot be. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No idea why that sounds familiar, [Ben](https://49.media.tumblr.com/a3c44b2c7ad1f81db38d8bf8908f86c1/tumblr_o26umrnhbb1us3ogyo1_250.gif). None at [all](http://45.media.tumblr.com/658c34ec6294ecf62729309b845cacbc/tumblr_o0e43jlcFs1v1u56ko1_250.gif).
> 
> Edited to add: Just wanted to take a second to acknowledge that I just changed my archive warning status from "none apply" to "author chose not to use." This isn't meant as an indicator that possible warning-worthy stuff is coming down the line, but simply done because I'm still a little new to this site and at the time that I posted the first chapter of this story I wasn't quite sure which option to go with. Having been here a little longer now, I've noticed that lots of other stories that I'd consider similar to mine in terms of content and tone use that tag instead. I decided it might be better to go that route as well. After all, the story is far from done, and I'd hate to accidentally mislead someone by claiming that absolutely nothing worthy of warning will ever happen down the line. 
> 
> Once again, don't take that as a totally unsubtle hint that I'm planning to have Rey or Ben die horrifically or anything. I just wanted to cover my bases a little!


	4. Chapter 4

On the bright side of all this, the throbbing ache in his head is doing an impressive job of masking the pain in the rest of his body.

 

As an afterthought, he adds “definitely not an optimist” to the very short mental list of things he knows about himself, right after “possibly Ben”, “kind of an asshole”, “impatient”, and “excessively tall.”

 

He’s not sure how he’s supposed to convince yet another person to go out of their way to help him, when the traits on that list hardly add up to a person worthy of the kind of selflessness he’s already been shown. 

 

He ought to be paying closer attention to the crowds, but it’s getting damn near impossible to even  _ think _ with all this noise. The headache had started shortly after Rey left him—in fact, it seemed to grow more and more intense with every step she took away from him, as though her mere presence had been a sort of balm. 

 

Indeed, aside from this pressure behind his eyes, he’s felt almost suspiciously uninjured ever since dismounting from her speeder, especially considering that the only real medical aid she’d rendered him had been some water to clean his wounds and an exceedingly bitter herbal remedy that had dulled the sharp sensations in his side just enough for him to get to sleep. There’s still pain now, but it’s more like spots of deep soreness that feel as though he’s been healing for several days, rather than having fallen out of the sky little more than a single day cycle ago.

 

He’ll have time to think on that later, when he’s gotten the help he needs. 

 

What he’s  _ meant _ to be doing is looking for a ship crew. 

 

What he’s  _ actually _ been doing for the past hour that he’s been alone is skulking in the meager shade of a basket seller’s tent, nursing this headache, and marveling at the masses of people, of races he does and does not recognize speaking in a dozen different tongues, and hardly a word of any of it sounding friendly.

 

The ones who even notice Ben give him a wide berth, but he’s beginning to understand Rey’s hyper-defensiveness, her guarded tones, the way almost every move she’d made around him had been a kind of shifting dance, like a fluid style of combat that left her prepared to clock him in the face at any moment. Though she’d offered next to no information about herself or her past, it was exceedingly obvious that she was alone in this place. Had it always been that way? 

 

The thought deepens his grimace, scowling around at the passing crowds as though they themselves made it so. Several tents away, a heavily veiled old woman argues in shrill shrieks with a creature less than half her height, the two of them gesticulating angrily at shattered clay pot in the sand between them. Before them, it had been a pair of apparently faceless insectoids who had gotten a little too close for comfort to a heavily stooped and wrinkled man, brought even lower by the cargo strapped to his back and none too happy about having his wares examined with such interest. 

 

An hour in Niima, and Ben feels fully for the first time how lucky he is to have been found by the keeper of the last shred of goodness for miles and miles. 

 

Found by, and then left by.

 

_ Forget her _ , he reminds himself gruffly.  _ She’s forgetting you _ . But he tries to draw the bitterness from that thought, like venom from a bite. It doesn’t feel good to think of her in anger that way, not the way it does to dream up insults for every miscreant citizen that passes into his line of sight, sniping and hissing at each other with sun-hardened combativeness.  

 

After all, what was she supposed to do, keep him on as a pet? Care for him when she’s still practically young enough to need caring for herself?

 

Not that he’d bothered to ask how old she was, he realizes now. 

 

Not that she would’ve answered him anyway.  

 

_ Not _ that he’d even have quite known what to do with that information, considering he doesn’t even know his own damn age either. The glimpse he’d gotten of his own face in that helmet visor back in Rey’s little encampment hadn’t told him much, except that he needs a good washing and a bit of a shave. 

 

_ Chuba, boska! _

 

The words startle him—first, because he realizes that he actually understands them.  _ You, get out! _

 

Second, because he doesn’t actually hear them out loud until a moment later.

 

“ _ Chuba, boska! _ ” 

 

The harsh cry comes from behind him, and he scarcely jumps out of the way in time to avoid being walloped in the back of a head with one of the baskets from the stall behind him, wielded by a squat, broad figure cloaked and goggled so efficiently against the sun and sand that Ben can hardly identify a  _ species _ , much less a gender.

 

“I’m just— _ waiting _ ,” he attempts to explain, reeling back mid-sentence to avoid another swing of the basket, this time almost grazing his chest. He scrambles for the words in this language he apparently understands—Huttese, that’s what it is—but finds his conversational skills far more limited than his listening comprehension. He tries to tell his assailant that he means no harm, that he’s only waiting for a ship, that he’ll move, but they either don’t understand him or don’t care. 

 

He wishes he knew whether the words that won’t come to him have simply been lost to his amnesia, or if even the fully functional, memory-enabled Ben is this hopeless at conjugation.

 

“ _ Wamma o yatuka! _ ” they shout, punctuated with a few shorter swats, as if he were a stray animal that had come sniffing around.  _ Pay or move! _

 

Those are the words he hears, and those are the words that he sees the mouth speak, and yet in his head there is more; besides the throbbing ache, a flurry of curses and angry words that come so quickly Ben can barely keep up with every third word.  _ Always coming around here—no respect—ought to be charging for it—not running a charity—the LAST time—see if I don’t— _

 

And—images? In his mind’s eye Ben sees the same basket stall, the same squat figure peddling them, only this time three raucously drunk men share the patch of shade cast by the canvas tent, roaring with cruel laughter and ensuring that the crowd gives them  _ and _ the basket seller a wide berth. A feeling of hunger stings in the background of this memory, as well an unpleasant dryness of mouth; the ailments of someone who did not earn enough to eat or drink that night. 

 

Ben is too stunned by this sensory overload to even notice the basket seller’s arm winding up again, much less to think to dodge. He stumbles when it makes contact with the side of his face, and a chorus of cackling erupts from the onlookers surrounding them, but it’s not the rather weak strike that staggers him. Rather, it’s the relentless buzzing—like a hundred voices added to the laughs and shouts and jeers around him.

 

How can no one else  _ hear _ it?

 

“ _ Hagwa _ ,” he begs—although it comes out as more of an irritated command—screwing up his eyes and pushing the heel of one hand into his forehead to try and alleviate some of the pressure. He dredges up the word as a plea.  _ Don’t _ .  

 

But even with his eyes closed, he can feel that his request has been ignored. 

 

Curiously, time seems to be moving quite slowly when he opens his eyes. The basket is beginning an impressive arc, its projected destination presumably to be the bruised side of his ribs. He’s not quite sure how to explain  _ how _ he knows this, only that it is suddenly as obvious as if the basket seller is silt in water, the traces of every moving current made visible.

 

All he means to do is raise a hand to deflect it. Honestly. 

 

As unwelcome as this encounter is, Ben is no mood for a fight, nor in a particularly good physical state for one; and though his body feels lean, like he might be fairly strong on a day where he’s not hobbled by countless injuries, for all he knows he’s some bean counter for a Coruscant corporation who’s never done a day of hard labor in his life, much less taken on an opponent in hand-to-hand combat. But when his arm extends fully in an effort to defend himself from the blow, he feels the oddest sensation, as though stirring up the current around  _ himself _ now, and moving fast, too fast, away from him and towards the enraged merchant—

 

—who suddenly goes sailing backwards with a strangled yell, straight through the canvas of their own tent, which balloons inward and collapses under the weight.

 

No one is laughing or jeering now.

 

One saving grace of this damaged mind is that it still works fast when focused on the present moment, and anyway, survival instincts wouldn’t be  _ instincts _ if you could forget how to use them. 

 

Taking advantage of the instant of stunned silence, Ben melts backwards into the crowd, pulling the hood of his outer garment up and doing his utter best to disappear despite the fact that he stands head and shoulders above more than half the onlookers surrounding him. 

 

Angling himself to slip through the narrow spaces between bodies, he fights his way around the corner of the next aisle of market stalls just as those nearest to the basket seller finally process what they’ve just seen. He hustles away a little more quickly as an agitated chatter erupts at the scene of the crime behind him, and whether it’s more angry or fearful he can’t quite tell—but one word pricks at his ears as it ripples through the crowd.

 

_ Jeedai. _

 

He doesn’t have much more than a second to think on that, though, as the distant hum of engines fills the Outpost, a sound that even he recognizes as the imminent approach of a ship making planetfall. His stomach swoops with a kind of childish excitement totally inappropriate for the situation, and he grits his teeth. All morning he has been subject to the bizarre reactions of his body to all manner of stimuli: a squeeze of longing at the smell of smoke and oil, a flash of annoyance as a droid’s metal exterior glints in the corner of his eye. 

 

_ I am barely in control _ , he thinks, the cold tendrils of panic unfurling inside him as they had before, watching Rey walk away from him and taking with her his last shred of protection from an unfamiliar body in an unfamiliar world. 

 

And now he is so little in control that he’s screwed up the  _ one _ thing he had to do—wait for a ship to come in. 

 

He won’t be able to go back to that spaceport without being recognized for at  _ least  _ several hours, and even then, he’ll have to avoid the basket seller, if they don’t just come searching for him themselves. 

 

The engines grow louder, but Ben presses forward, keeping his head down.    

 

**

 

She’d only meant to stay long enough to settle this contrived new debt she owes to Unkar Plutt.

 

Some business acquaintance of his had evidently introduced him to the concept of service fees in the last few months, and since then, he had gleefully sprung surprise charges on the scavengers of Niima every few weeks, most often in the form of one piece of scavenged tech provided to him in exchange for zero payment—not even one measly quarter-portion.

 

_ It’s not cheap to support an entire community _ , he says to each complaint.  

 

With all the spare junk lying around her own space, the first few demands for free labor hadn’t been difficult for Rey to meet. But  _ yesterday _ , the perfectly good infrared receptor she’d weeks ago yanked out of a defunct R2 unit buried three feet under the sand—head intact, but with a hole the circumference of her waist blasted through its torso—had apparently  _ not _ been adequate payment for the “improved tools” Plutt had provided at his workstations.

 

Near as she can tell, he just threw away some of the more gnarled sand brushes and redistributed the remaining ones among the work tables. Occasionally she has some weight to throw around on matters such as these, but at the end of the day, he’s still the one doling out the food and water supplies. It’s difficult to reason with someone who has an uncanny knack for knowing just how many days he has to wait until your tongue is so dry you can hardly speak to curse him anymore. 

 

But after settling her debt with the infrared receptor  _ and _ the photoreceptor  _ and _ the audiofilament, heading back to her speeder seemed….premature.

 

After all, time and energy are precious on Jakku. It’s best to make sure she truly has nothing else to attend to in Niima before speeding out into the dunes, which is how she ends up fishing another item of scavenge out of her pack and sitting down to scrub it clean…

 

...followed by another…

 

...and another.

 

And, Maker,  _ yes _ . She can’t seem to bring herself to leave, knowing for a fact that no ships have landed in the Niima spaceport yet today. They aren’t an overly popular pit stop, but usually you can expect at least one visiting crew a day looking to trade or sample the Knockback Nectar before moving on. 

So why, upon hearing that distinct sound of approaching engines, doesn’t she feel relieved?

 

“ _ Hey _ ,” rasps one of the scavengers at the workbench opposite hers, a scraggly dark-bearded greenhorn by the name of Marcel. He’s one of the newer faces around Niima, allegedly dumped off here almost two years ago now at the behest of a few Nar Shaddaan bookies who’d grown tired of cornering him in alleyways to collect on his debts one measly credit at a time. 

 

“You going to work, or you going to sit there hogging the good brush all morning?” he says, probably meaning to snipe, but really only managing to whine at her. He makes sure to raise his voice in hopes of being overheard by the junkboss himself, but the Blobfish is too busy cutting down some poor bastard’s find into worthlessness to notice that he’s being sucked up to. 

 

Rey’s quick glare shuts him up. She’s trying to get a look at the ship approaching the spaceport, but it’s crossing in front of the midmorning sun at just the wrong angle now, turned to silhouette by the dazzling light before sinking mostly out of view below the horizon of tents and market stalls on the other side of Niima. The design she glimpses is unknown to her, with great angled wings that fold upwards out of the way as it lands, but the body of the ship appears to be a decent enough size. 

 

Ordinarily a new, unfamiliar ship like this would bring Rey speeding in from the dunes just to get a look at it up close—but  _ he’s _ still over there, she thinks, with a horrible, gnawing guilt. Ben. 

 

_ Just let him be on his way. There’s nothing more you could have done for him. _

 

But she can’t swallow that lie one more time this morning. She’d  _ felt _ how terrified he really was, and she could’ve stayed with him. Could’ve seen him off. Could’ve made sure he was alright. But she’d kept her head above sand one way, and one way only all these years: by not getting attached.

 

Focus. A ship like that will have accommodations for a small crew: cabins, kitchens, a med bay, and certainly enough space for an extra passenger. 

 

_ Good. That’s good,  _ she thinks, and yet finds that her grip on the old battery she’s cleaning has become painfully tight all of a sudden, her brushstrokes quickening to a manic, almost violent pace. At the other table, Marcel gives her a wary look and angles himself away from her, inching closer to the two old women sharing his workstation.

 

Rey manages to dawdle for another twenty minutes or so, anxiously scrubbing her way through the last few pieces of scrap in her satchel until she truly has no more excuses to stay, since none of these parts are ready for sale, not until she tinkers further with them with her own tools back at home. Marcel keeps his head down as she rises with her pack and begins to amble past—he never has anything to say once you’re actually within arm’s reach of him—but one of the old women lifts her face from the rusted compressor in her dusty hands. 

 

“Ought to mind yourself out there today,” she croaks softly as Rey passes in front of her, with an ease that suggests she’s never had to raise her voice when she wants to be heard. “Heard there was some transmission overnight about a bounty in this part of the galaxy that’s got the lawmen stirred up. The  _ un _ lawful men, too.” A toothless smirk cracks her lined face at her own joke.

 

Rey stops short. “A bounty? On who?”

 

“Oh,” the woman replies with maddening slowness, “Some  _ man _ , as usual.” She casts a disapproving glare at Marcel, two seats away, as though responsible for all the crimes of his gender. “Isn’t that always it? Some man in some starfighter that don’t belong to him going somewhere he don’t belong. But it’s no small amount on the capture, which is what’s got everyone in a tizzy. For fifty thousand credits, maybe  _ I  _ ought to be out there looking, too.” 

 

“If you haven’t caught a man after eighty-odd years, you won’t catch one now!” the other woman, her companion, cackles, and the two of them wheeze with a much heartier kind of laughter than one might expect from their advanced age. 

 

_ Everything is tougher than it looks on Jakku _ , Rey thinks. It has to be. 

 

She moves on despite her lingering questions, knowing she’ll get no more from the snickering pair. 

 

**

 

The crowd is thick today, forcing Rey to make slow progress to the end of the Outpost where she’d left her speeder. There’s some commotion over by the spaceport, where the bodies are packed in tightest—people excited by the sleek-looking ship and coming over to get a look, most likely, since fancy ships usually mean fancy people with money to spend. 

 

Rey turns, opting for the route down the next aisle rather than the one running parallel to the spaceport. A crowd is just one more reason for her to stay away.

 

Trying and failing to ignore the smoky smell of curing meat, Rey tosses a longing glance at the stall to her right—and notices right away that the old woman must have been right about the lawmen being stirred up, as the spot where Deputy Drego usually keeps watch outside the food vendor is conspicuously empty. Constable Zuvio  _ always _ has one of his deputies manning this post to discourage those with empty pockets and emptier stomachs from snatching a bite to eat. But not today.

 

So odd is this absence that Rey’s eyes are still lingering on that empty patch of dirt where the stoic Kyuzo deputy ought to be when she ambles by the side of the droid repair tent, and suddenly something hooks her wrist and  _ yanks _ , jerking her through the gap between the closed roughhewn fabric flaps and bringing her to a very short stop with her back against a solid wall of body. 

 

A hand clamps over her mouth before much more than the first breaths of a very confused “ _ What the—” _ can escape. For a moment, the body behind her says nothing, practically quivering with tension as it waits and clamps the hand on her mouth even more tightly as Rey begins attempting to shout into it angrily, struggling against her captor’s grip to try and grasp the quarterstaff from where it hangs off her shoulder.

 

The warm of a mouth by her ear causes her to fall silent. 

 

“I’m sorry I had to scare you like this. I think I’m in trouble,” the voice whispers, and Rey practically goes limp with relief. 

 

Ben.

 

He releases her, and she whirls on him at once, giving him a great shove in that massive chest of his.

 

"You  _ arse _ ,” she hisses, resisting the urge to clutch at her heart as he stumbles back a step or two. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

 

“I told you I was  _ sorry _ ,” Ben hisses back, flinching with one arm out to defend himself, though Rey has already backed down from her offensive position, fists clenched but arms lowered to her sides. “And like I said, I think I’m in trouble, and would you  _ please _ keep your voice down?” 

 

"I already  _ am, _ ” she whisper-shouts back at him, and if she weren’t so livid about having ten years taken off her life with shock, she’d be tempted to laugh at the way remorse and irritation battle for dominance on his face. “Would you put your arms down and just tell me what’s going on? I’m not going to hit you,” she adds.

 

Warily, he straightens up out of his defensive posture, his dark hair nearly brushing the sloping canvas ceiling. 

 

“Well?” Rey prompts, but Ben only holds up a hand indicating for her to wait as he silently moves to the closed flap of the tent again, creating a small space with his long fingers and peering out with one dark eye. He returns after a few seconds, apparently satisfied for the moment.

 

“There was another...incident,” he admits, sounding as reluctant as he had when admitting he needed her assistance to stand after crawling out into the sand outside her home. Clearly, he was not someone who enjoyed taking help from others.

 

“An incident,” Rey echoes. “Like what happened in my house?”

 

“Not exactly,” he murmurs, lowering his eyes, and he begins to explain to her his confrontation with the basket seller, how he’d been trying to raise a hand to defend himself and all of a sudden sent the merchant flying without even touching them. Rey takes him in as he speaks, fitting the pieces together; the strange powers, the odd robes...

 

“A few people in the crowd, I heard...well, they seemed to think I was…”

 

He doesn’t need to finish.

 

Yes, the few stories she’s heard from off-worlders and old-timers  _ do _ seem to fit—and yet that’s all they’ve ever been to her, until this moment. Just stories. Tales of noble warriors in command of awesome powers and elegant weapons, trained to uphold justice and diplomacy, keeping the peace in each corner of galaxy. 

 

Except here. Never here, in this forgotten little mound of dust, where old women and little girls starve and break their backs in the name of greed. She used to dream some nights, back when she’d first learned of this Order, of a fleet of them coming to arrest the junkboss who made her rewire a hyperdrive over and over until her little fingers bled, until it was perfect, because she was the best, she’d always been the best, and as long as he fed her he owned everything about her. But they never came.

 

Until now.

 

“The Jedi,” Rey breathes, speaking more to herself than to him. “The—the Force. They’re real.”

 

His face pales at her words, and she can scarcely blame him. Here he is, hardly even able to remember his own name, much less what must have been an entire life’s worth of Jedi training meant to prepare him for danger and turmoil. And he’d revealed his abilities to an entire crowd, a crowd that may very well included one of the deputies now on the lookout for a man with a large bounty out for his capture…

 

“We have to get you away from here,” Rey tells him, surprising even herself with the resoluteness of this statement. All she knows is that the Jedi she hoped would come for her never looked this lost in her dreams, and she wants to make it stop. 

 

She surprises herself once more by finding his hand and grasping it tightly. 

 

“Come on,” she urges, and pulls him back out through the flap of the tent still hand-in-hand, just in time to see a squad of white-armored troopers rounding the corner heading directly towards them.

 

“Freeze!” comes the directive, barked through a crackling voice amplifier.

  
But Rey hasn’t survived this long by standing still.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not someone who is super familiar with all the minutiae of the universe, so I just want to apologize/give a little warning that I'm someone who tends to invent my own characters (like Marcel and the old women in this chapter) whenever I'm not 100% sure about how to use some of the characters or details that appear in materials outside of the films (for example, I haven't gotten my hands on a copy of Rey's Survival Guide yet). I am absorbing more whenever I can though, both from other people's wonderfully researched fics and just from looking through various wikis and whatnot. There's just so much that it's a bit intimidating for a newcomer like me!
> 
> If anyone has any suggestions for good things to read just to become more familiar with details/characters/events that aren't necessarily in the films, let me know! 
> 
> And as always, thanks for reading c:


	5. Chapter 5

The shout of “ _ Run! _ ” dies on Rey’s lips when she realizes that Ben is already moving, and dragging her along with him as her grip on his hand suddenly becomes more aptly described as  _ his _ grip on  _ her _ hand.  

 

She feels the first shot before she even hears the scream of the blaster, the energy bolt practically singeing off the raised hairs on her neck as it tears past and superheats the air where she’d been standing only a fraction of a second before her companion ripped her out of the way. 

 

The instinct to yank her hand away from his burns up in the aftermath of that shot. 

 

She’s always been a fast runner, but there is no arguing with the enormous length of his stride, his long legs eating up distance with far less effort than her best sprint would take.

 

“Through there!” she gasps, finding herself needing to shout over the sudden chorus of weapons firing, and the pair of them duck through another canvas doorway and out the other side into the next market aisle, leaving angry shouts from the occupants in their wake. The smell of burning reaches her nose as a barrage of energy bolts sear holes through the sides of tents, puncture slats of wood, explode through bricks of chalky dry mud and stone. 

 

They dodge through another merchant stall, the tip of Rey’s quarterstaff catching on the metal handle of a pot hanging overhead and ripping down the whole display of cookware in an earsplitting cacophony of clanging metal. 

 

“Split up!” Rey hears the sound of the electronically amplified voice declare, much too close for comfort, and Ben pulls up short as a squad of four white-plated stormtroopers emerges from a narrow alley between the Constable’s office and a small pavilion sheltering several Luggabeasts from the intense sun. 

 

Her stomach drops the way it does when she misses a step climbing high, high up into one of the ships in the Starship Graveyard—because these troopers are approaching from the opposite direction that the first unit came from, blocking their way to her speeder. 

 

_ They’re boxing us in _ , she realizes with a growing coldness, and Ben snaps his head around around to look at her so quickly that it actually manages to startle her on top of everything else, as though he’d heard her thoughts aloud.

 

“Shouldn’t you have some kind of—of—laser sword?” she stammers, sizing up the approaching soldiers, who blessedly had yet to spot them due to Ben’s quick halt. Four men of their size wouldn’t normally give her too much trouble, but the attackers she’s fended off over the years never had armor to hide behind, nor a platoon’s worth of backup marching around the perimeter, and even a deft spin of her quarterstaff won’t stop a blaster shot. 

 

It doesn’t help how utterly  _ creepy _ it is to see the armor that she’s seen lying motionless in the desert nearly every day for eighteen years up and walking around like the reanimated dead. The armor she’d scavenged the lenses for her work goggles from had been blessedly empty, a helmet likely cast aside by a dying man desperate for an unobstructed last breath, but she’d always avoided the few full suits left untouched by time and her fellow scavengers, wholly disinclined to disturb the skeletons inside.

 

“A lightsaber,” Ben corrects her, and she rather dislikes the tone he’s taking as someone who didn’t even know what planet he was on less than twelve standard hours ago. “And no, if I’d had one, I imagine you’d have stripped me of it when you were searching my lifeless body.”

 

“For  _ wounds _ ,” Rey begins defensively, but kriffing hell, he’s  _ teasing _ again, isn’t he?  _ Now? _ “Shut up and  _ move _ ,” she hisses, letting go of his hand to shove him bodily behind a stack of crates. 

 

“The fastest way out of here is  _ past _ them,” she says by way of explanation, somehow able to read deeper into the apprehension on his face to a more specific question: why not keep running? “If we go any further forward we’ll have to double back to the speeder. Now would be an amazing time for one of those fancy Jedi tricks, by the way.”

 

“Of course,” he bites back, “What was I thinking, running for my life?”

 

“I’m just  _ saying _ ,” she says, “It’s not like you haven’t done it before. You could pretend one of them is a kindly stranger reaching out to help you, if that helps.”

 

His face goes a rather unhealthy shade of purple. “Are you  _ trying _ to piss me off?”

 

“Actually, yes. So far that’s the common denominator for the times you’ve managed to launch something into the air. Or maybe you could stand up and make them all suddenly remember a rash they urgently need checked out—”

 

She cuts off, both at Ben’s furious look and at the sight of one of the troopers suddenly elbowing his nearest comrade and gesturing to their hiding place with the muzzle of his gun—rather poor blaster etiquette, Rey can’t help but think.

 

“What about you? Any fancy tricks?” Ben snaps.

 

“Just one,” she breathes, watching the four stormtroopers approach, suspicion obvious in their every movement, weapons down but at the ready. “But you’re going to have to move fast. You understand?”

 

“I—”

 

“Good.  _ Go! _ ” Rey cries, at the same that she heaves the top crate in front of her  _ forward _ with all her might, sending it flying into the nearest trooper with an almighty crash before she leaps up on to the bottom crate, quarterstaff in hand, to jump into the fray. 

 

She connects solidly with the second stormtrooper’s helmet, sending him reeling backwards as the other end of her staff wallops the third in the midsection—not a devastating blow, but enough to throw him off balance. She’s about to follow through with a strike to the fourth trooper’s chestplate, but Ben is already there, appearing behind him to give him a brutal shove forward, ringing his head like a bell inside his helmet against the crate in front of him. The blaster clatters from the fourth trooper’s grip, and Ben seizes it at once, despite the wild look in his eyes that tells her even  _ he _ knows how weird he must look holding that thing.

 

“D’you know how to use that?” she asks, felling stormtrooper number three with a blow to the knee. In response, Ben aims the weapon past her, squeezing the trigger as the second trooper charges back towards them. The red bolt clips his shoulder, sending him staggering backwards once more, but this time to the ground.

 

“Apparently,” Ben says, and hooks her arm to jerk her along with him as he begins rushing past the scene of their carnage. Rey pumps her burning legs, heart feeling like it’s about to make an escape attempt of its own via her throat as they near the edge of the Outpost—twenty steps—ten steps—her speeder is in view—

 

—when a hail of blasterfire pelts the ground around their feet, causing her to shriek and stumble, kept upright only by Ben’s solid grip on her arm. Plumes of sand erupt around her speeder, more bolts striking the ground so close to their only means of escape, but they have to get there, they  _ have to.  _

 

She wants to cry out again as Ben fires his stolen blaster over his shoulder, so close to her ear that its deadly scream is followed by a kind of hollow ringing that silences everything else except her own hammering pulse. In its own bizarre way, it helps, allowing her to block out everything but the shock of her feet pounding the dirt, the ragged breath in her chest, and the feel of Ben’s hand clasped just above her wrist.

 

And they’re there. Somehow, they’re there. Rey leaps astride her speeder and twists the ignition, the glorious sound of it roaring to life unfairly muffled by her ringing ears. Ben jumps on behind her totally gracelessly, jostling her forward violently in his haste, but his presence behind her is a welcome feeling this time. 

 

This time she does let out a shout of elation as the speeder shoots forwards, leaving blaster bolts and chaos behind them as Rey points the speeder into the dunes, and just  _ goes. _

 

**

 

She’s not heading for the AT AT.

 

Loose hairs around her face whip into her eyes, having had no time to slip on her goggles during their escape. Rey is in familiar terrain still, but as the sands continue to whip by underneath the speeder, she’s not entirely sure whether she doesn’t  _ want _ to stop yet, or if she  _ can’t. _ Her fingers are clamped so tight around the acceleration controls, tense with terror, that it feels as if she might be forced to drive for miles and miles more before she can relax enough to let go.

 

Until Ben shifts his weight behind her, cramped on the back of the speeder where there’s barely any room for him, holding the blaster at his side in one hand, the other arm wrapped too loosely around her waist to really provide adequate stability as though trying to demonstrate his intent not to offend with the necessary touch.

 

_ Stop panicking,  _ she half-scolds, half-begs herself. _ You’re not alone. Stop. Stop. This isn’t over. You need to get it together and  _ think.

 

The skeleton of an MC80 Star Cruiser looms not too far in the distance, with two downed X-wings and a minefield of miscellaneous ship debris in front of it rendered into indistinct lumps by the shimmering heat blurring the horizon line. The scene had always made Rey uneasy whenever she visited this particular ruin in the past, the size and position of the ships reminding her too strongly of something like a mother animal and her young, their carcasses left behind in the sand by some lurking predator.     

 

“No one on our tail just yet,” Rey says, doing her best to toss the words over her shoulder so that her companion can hear her over the roar of the wind—though hoping the volume conceals something of the hoarseness in her voice. These are the first words she’s managed since taking off into the desert. “We’ll stop ahead. And—hold on  _ properly _ . It’s about to get turbulent.”

 

When he doesn’t move in response, she frees one hand from the controls briefly to fit it over top of Ben’s quite deliberately, moving it so that his arm encircles her waist more tightly. The action makes her heart come into her throat with the most irritating sense of self-consciousness—when has she ever worried about something as ridiculous as being too  _ bold _ ? They’re trying to  _ survive _ for kriff’s sake—but she works to push the awkward feeling aside.

 

Now reasonably certain Ben won’t go flying off the back if she makes a sudden movement, she leans in for better control of the speeder, bringing it to a slight elevation to skim above the field of debris, guiding it deftly around the larger chunks and in between the X-wings towards the tail of the cruiser where a ragged opening grants them access.

 

After she guides them inside the craft, Rey finds herself abruptly leaping from the speeder as soon as it comes to a stop, scrambling away quite a few yards deeper into the interior of the ship where the less damaged part of the hull provides a darkness broken only by very distant shafts of light filtering in through rusted holes. She stops just beyond the edge of that darkness, dropping down almost involuntarily to her knees, hands coming up to her forehead in sheer shock as she tries desperately to catch her breath, feeling almost as if she’d  _ run _ that whole distance rather than racing across it in her speeder.

 

No, she hasn’t forgotten Ben. Even if she couldn’t hear him there behind her, his boots crunching sandy grit on metal as he takes cautious steps towards her, she can feel the weight of his wary gaze on her back and the heavy apprehension rolling off of him, so obviously feeling that he should say something to her, but afraid of provoking an even worse reaction than this one. 

 

“I’m sorry,” she half-gasps, in between blowing out big, steadying breaths. “I’m sorry, I just—I’ve never—I mean I’ve  _ fought _ , but nothing like—like—”

 

“I shouldn’t have asked this of you,” he replies when she drops off, unable to finish the thought. His voice is harsh and low, speaking almost to himself.

 

Rey rests her hands down on her knees, head bowed as she collects herself. True, she’d only ended up assaulting and fleeing from stormtroopers because  _ he’d _ somehow brought them down on their heads—he and that bounty of his, which now seemed to have a lot more on the line than just fifty thousand credits. But she’d had her chance to walk away from this, and  _ she’d _ decided to come back. 

 

In retrospect, that decision had come before she’d looked down the muzzle of an E-11 blaster rifle, but her resolve to help him hasn’t evaporated in the heat of a few plasma bolts.

 

“Look at me,” she says to the darkness, wiping a palm under her eye to dry the thin sheen of moisture that had begun to pool there. She tries to force a laugh at herself. “Freaking out when you’re the one who needs help. I’m sorry.” 

 

Rey pushes herself back to her feet, turning back to face him and scrubbing one hand back from her forehead into her hair in a halfhearted attempt to smooth the loose bits away from her face.

 

Ben stands rigid, the sullen look on his face cast partially into shadow. “I’ve acted selfishly. There’s no reason I should be dragging you down into... _ whatever _ this situation is. I’ll go back there and present myself for arrest, tell them you had nothing to do with anything I’ve done.” 

 

“Don’t be stupid,” she says fiercely. “I said that I would help you, and I intend to keep that promise. We don’t know that you’ve  _ done _ anything at all, and I certainly don’t intend to let you turn yourself over to a bloody firing squad. The galaxy doesn’t exactly have the best record when it comes to giving Jedi due process.” 

 

“ _ Stupid? _ ” Ben fires back sharply. “You could’ve been killed because you were helping me. You’d be  _ stupid _ to continue.”

 

“I _ choose _ do a hundred things that might kill me every week,” Rey answers him, and beneath the determined facade part of her can’t help but feel impressed with the evenness of her own voice, even as the adrenaline still pumping through her body leaves her feeling like an unstable atom. “I climb higher than I ought to, I work longer than I ought to, I go further than I know is safe. Sometimes it’s to make sure I eat that day, but sometimes, it’s because I need to do it for myself. Do you understand the difference?”

 

Ben regards her warily, the way people in Niima look at the babbling beggars driven mad by the heat. Obviously, he doesn’t get it.

 

Rey sighs. “It’s the difference between keeping your body alive, and keeping your  _ self _ alive. I avoid getting hurt if I don’t help you but...I don’t want to be the kind of person who survives by not helping people.” She bites her lip. “Not anymore.” 

 

Ben’s silence stretches on just a moment too long, enough for her to wonder whether he’s going to lash out with another accusation of stupidity, or storm off, or  _ something _ , when his mouth quirks just the tiniest bit. “I don’t suppose I could do anything to stop you,” he says, “Considering I saw you drop three armored men in one move.”

 

It’s an observation, not a question, but Rey can’t resist seizing it.

 

“It was two moves, really. But you’re right: not with those bruised ribs, you couldn’t. Although—” Rey narrows her eyes suddenly, taking a few quick steps to close the distance between them, “You’ve been getting on  _ suspiciously _ well considering how banged up you are. Are you quite sure you haven’t lost sensation in your torso, or something?” 

 

She reaches out for his side, getting as far as her fingertips brushing the rough cloth of his dark tunic when he flinches away, lightly grabbing her hand and holding it away from his body.

 

“Trust me, it still hurts,” he says, tone still light but dark eyes emphasizing the point, instantly more alert at the threat of pain. He releases her fingers gently, but a troubled look—or perhaps thoughtful, she hasn’t yet been able to tell the difference on him—crosses his face. “Not as much as it did before, though. Not nearly as much as it should.”

 

“I wasn’t going to jab you in the side, you know,” Rey says somewhat defensively, withdrawing the hand he’d snatched. “I just wanted to...I don’t know, make sure you actually still  _ had _ ribs. Last time I had an injury like that, I was laid up for a whole week. Had to eat the straps off of my boots.”

 

“Well?” she adds, after beat with no response from him. 

 

“That’s awful,” he says, kind of halfheartedly, clearly thinking she was looking for some kind of sympathetic commentary on her impoverished childhood. 

 

She sighs again. “ _ Well _ , are you going to let me see your ribs, or what?”

 

He seems perturbed by her question for some reason, but before he can respond, Rey thrusts a hand up at him in the intergalactic sign for  _ “Shut it.” _

 

Ben looks positively startled, but Rey only holds the hand up more firmly, doing an impressively silent dash to the opening of the ship that they’d entered through and staring off into the desert, scanning. About two hundred meters out, the distinctive silhouette of a Luggabeast and its mounted Teedo trudges down the ridge of a dune. She allows herself to relax somewhat, but paces back to Ben quickly. 

 

“I don’t know why we aren’t being pursued yet, but we need to take advantage of it and move on,” she tells him, striding over to her speeder to check the contents of her satchel. There’s no way they can just head straight back to the AT AT, now that she’s been seeing helping Ben. She’s always prepared with some meager supplies in case she needs to spend the night away from home, but whether it’ll be enough between the two of them remains to be seen.

 

“What was out there?” he asks. 

 

“Just one of the Teedos, probably coming to check out this wreck. Their encampment is a pretty long haul from here so they don’t comb this crash site much. It doesn’t look like he’s coming from the Outpost, but we’re better off avoiding company.”

 

Ben squints out the back of the cruiser before turning his gaze back to Rey, brow furrowed. “You heard him from all the way over here?”

 

Rey pauses in the act of rifling through her bag.  _ Had _ she actually heard anything? “I must’ve, I suppose,” she says, “I don’t know. I can usually just tell when another scavenger is coming up on me out here.”

 

“You can just...tell.” Ben doesn’t look convinced.

 

Rey frowns at him as she stands up “Your skepticism would work a lot better if it wasn’t coming from a telekinetic monk trained by an order of mysterious wizards.”

 

“ _ Wizards _ ?” Ben sputters, aghast.

 

Rey shrugs. “That’s how folks around here tell it. Regardless, we need to move on. We’re too close to Niima here, and I’m better at overnighting out by the  _ Ravager _ . I know of a few emergency supply caches out that way that might not be totally picked over.”

 

“Emergency supplies?” Ben asks, and she feels a prickle of amusement mixed with guilt at the spark of hope in his eyes that he can’t quite conceal.

 

“Not food, sorry,” she says, trying to break it to him without chuckling. She motions for him to climb back on to the speeder, doing her best to cover her rueful smirk. It’s not actually funny at all—it’s just that all of a sudden she has a much deeper appreciation for the older scavengers who’d passed on much the same information to her back when she was a three-foot-nothing greenhorn, barely big enough to carry a battery cell on her back. “We’re back to splitting my rations for the time being, unless we can manage to hunt something.”

 

“So what, then?” Ben asks, watching Rey as she throws a leg over and settle herself into her seat.

 

“Well, it gets cold out there at night, especially if you can’t take shelter in one of the wreck sites,” Rey says, suddenly regretting bringing up this topic at all, “And...er...no offense, but I’m not one hundred percent sure you’re going to fit under my blanket.”

 

The strangest look appears on Ben’s face at that, but Rey doesn’t have time to question it, as he finally moves to position himself on the back of the speeder once more. He hesitates for an instant before looping his arm around her waist again, but with no loose, uncertain grip this time. Rey takes an experimental breath, feeling her lower ribs expand under his broad palm and trying to adjust herself to the feeling, hoping against hope that this minor indulgence escapes his notice.

 

She almost thinks it has, when he leans in to murmur, “Let’s go,” and gives her an almost imperceptible squeeze.

 

They go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hooray for updates that take less than a month! 
> 
> I discovered that fight scenes are a _lot_ of fun to write. I was a bit nervous because I've never really had cause to write action into a story before, but I had a pretty good time writing it. 
> 
> Thanks to all for reading, as always c:


	6. Chapter 6

This girl is going to be the death of him. 

 

That, or she’s going to kill him.

 

The two options might sound like the same fate, but there are some key differences.. 

 

In his defense, he’s honestly not  _ trying _ to listen to her thoughts. Alone with only Rey now, it seems obvious that this ability is the source of the heinously distracting—not to mention painful—affliction he’d been suffering from back at the Outpost. The buzzing, indistinct voices; the words and images that came to him; he knows now that these must have been the thoughts of the onlookers focusing their attention on him, unfiltered and invading his mind.

 

He is certain of this because it’s happening _now_. She’s definitely going to kill him when he tells her, but at least that will be a _quick_ death, as opposed to the wholly merciless fate of knowing that the girl plastered to his chest is obsessively replaying the moment that she’d wrapped his arm around her midsection over and over again in her mind as they whip over the desert sands.

 

And on top of that, paying a little less attention to steering than he’s entirely comfortable with.

 

He has to stop himself from prematurely sagging off the side of the speeder in relief as Rey eases up on the accelerator, slowing them as they finally approach the behemoth ruin that has been looming before them on the horizon for the past three-quarters of an hour. Rey had zigzagged them through the desert for a while before that, giving a wide berth to signs of other scavengers and making brief pauses to shelter inside a few other skeletal wrecks that looked the most abandoned. 

 

With each stop, she’d expressed her growing unease that no one had yet appeared to be following them, especially considering that their escape had been witnessed by nearly a dozen stormtroopers. Why didn’t they go back to ship and give chase? Are they tracking us from orbit? What are they  _ waiting _ for? 

 

Even though he agrees, there isn’t exactly much they can do about it besides find a place to hide for the night and hope for the best.

 

The  _ Ravager _ is even more massive than Ben had guessed during their approach, stretching miles into the distance, the cavernous engine thrusters looming over them as they approach the hull, easily twenty times the height of any structure he’s seen on this planet so far. 

 

Rey guides the speeder up the swath of sand that leads inside the centermost thruster, and Ben tries—and fails—not to imagine the monstrous beams of energy that must have propelled this ship before its demise; how quickly and easily the two of them would have been vaporized within it, like nothing more than two grains of sand. 

 

“Home sweet home,” Rey quips, her voice just barely breaking the echoey silence inside the ship that suddenly envelopes them as the speeder powers down. She hops off, pulling on one shoulder and straining her neck this way and that, trying in vain to rid herself of the discomfort that comes from confining yourself to the narrow seat of a speeder bike for hours.

 

_ At least she had an actual seat _ , he thinks as he watches her, before individually prying his legs out of their cramped position so he can stand, tense from clinging tightly to the bike’s smooth metal chassis. There hadn’t exactly been a second pair of footholds for him back there.

 

“Sorry, didn’t think to install sidecar on the off chance I picked up a fugitive,” Rey says, tossing the words over her shoulder as she squints into the darkness of the ship’s interior. “Maybe I’ll get started on that once this whole ‘interplanetary manhunt’ thing blows over.” 

 

At that, she fishes a handlight out of her satchel and aims a narrow beam of light down the vast, yawning corridor. Wind whistles at some distant end of the ship, grains of sand whispering against metal all around them. 

 

It’s almost eerie enough to distract him from the realization that she responded to something he hadn’t even spoken aloud.

 

“I said nothing of the sort,” he chokes out, going somewhat cold at the sensation of the psychic tables being turned on him, and at the idea of having to address his own inadvertent invasions of her mind before he’s quite figured out how to go about it.

 

But the exasperated look she gives him isn’t the face of a girl who knows she’s just snagged a thought out of someone else’s consciousness.

 

“Didn’t have to,” she huffs, sweeping her light back and forth over a spot high up on the ragged metal wall opposite them as they make their way deeper into the ship. “No offense, but you’re not exactly a closed book when you’re annoyed.”

 

“I’m not  _ annoyed _ ,” Ben huffs back at her—and no, the irony isn’t lost on him, but something about her sharp tongue makes him particularly bad at holding back his own. He lets his eyes linger on her as she puts her hand out, feeling for something along the wall. 

 

Maybe he’s just being paranoid. After all, growing up in a hostile place like this, Rey must have become rather skilled at reading body language and predicting what might provoke someone to violence or a disagreement—standing too close to a basket stand, for instance. And it  _ would  _ make sense that discovering he can invade the private thoughts of others would make him a little wary about the privacy of his own.

 

But even so...       

 

_ Atrophied, maybe. But not annoyed. _ He aims the thought at the back of her head experimentally, his eyes practically boring a hole into the space between those loops of chestnut hair, but she just keeps feeling her way along the wall without even the briefest hesitation.

 

Alright, then. Good. 

 

And yet he has to admit that the slightest bit of disappointment tinges the relief. It wouldn’t have been  _ all _ bad to have someone else join him in his head for a bit, to help him explore the shadowy corners. Maker knows he wouldn’t want to be in this darkened wreck of a ship by himself for very long, and at the moment, his brain isn’t feeling like all that much different of a place.

 

Self-consciously, he tugs at his sleeve as he follows Rey, the darkness increasing around them with every step. The evidence is all there; the Force powers, the robes, the shuttle full of stormtroopers arriving hot on his tail after his apparent crash. Yet when he thinks of the word  _ Jedi _ his brain seems to erect a barrier of empty space that only expands the harder he pushes against it, refusing to conjure anything more specific than the kind of general knowledge one might find in historical archives, or that a child might learn in school. 

 

Servants of the light side, defenders of peace and justice, diplomats, and enemies of the dark. Conflict. Wars.  _ Slaughters. _ Hope? Is that really what his life has been defined by? 

 

None of it registers inside him the way he knows it should. Rey’s voice, panicked in the heat of their escape, comes back to him.  _ Shouldn’t you have some kind of—of—laser sword? _ From what little he knows, he ought to have been inseparable from that infamous weapon. Would it have helped him to remember anything, to hold some tangible proof of his old life? Would his muscles have retained the memory of how to wield it, despite his mind’s efforts to purge everything else?

 

More likely, he’d just hurt himself with it. Or someone else. And he’s really trying to avoid doing any more damage to his present company.

 

Too deep in his thoughts to see that she’s stopped, he walks right into her.

 

“ _ Kriff! _ ” Rey gasps, handlight flying out of her grip and clattering across the sandy metal floor, their only source of light now illuminating a distant juncture of wall and piping, and leaving him clutching both of her shoulders in almost complete darkness. 

 

This time, the image that jumps out of her mind and into his is different—his hands enveloping her slender arms as she helps him to his feet in the sand outside of her home. It’s entirely jarring, not just because he’s seeing himself from the outside, but to see himself from  _ her _ point of view tinged with a brief splash of her thoughts and emotions. Despite how utterly pathetic he looks, dirty and injured and on his knees in front of her, he feels the hitch in her breath as his hands close around her forearms, at how  _ easily _ he dwarfs her as he finally stands.

 

Maker, she really  _ is _ going to kill him when she finds out about this. 

 

He murmurs an apology and releases her shoulders at once as though burned, unable to resist examining his own long, outstretched fingers in bemusement.  _ What  _ is so fascinating about his hands?

 

“My fault, actually,” Rey confesses, sounding a bit sheepish as she scrambles forward to retrieve her light. He sort of wishes that he could see her face a bit better as she says this, more than just the side of it in the dark, because almost every expression aimed at him over the past twenty-four hours has been angry in some way, or at the very least  _ accusing _ him of something, and it would be a nice change to see something halfway pleasant before he’s shot on site or carted off to a prison cell for the rest of his life.

 

“I haven’t used this emergency stash in ages,” she continues, fixing her light on a spot on the wall ten or so feet above their heads, “Couldn’t remember exactly how far in it was until I was right on top of it. I usually don’t need much when I’m on my own, not enough to justify cracking one of these open.”

 

Ben squints at the spot her light is hitting, unable to see anything but the flat metal of the wall dirtied by sand and rust. “You scavenge in groups?” he asks, unable to fully disguise the note of revulsion in his voice. He can’t imagine a single face in that crowd in Niima belonging to someone you’d turn your back on for more than half a second, much less partner up with to ensure your own safety and success. 

 

“Used to,” is all Rey says, before pushing the light into his hands and adjusting it somewhat forcefully to indicate he ought to keep the beam in place.   

 

She’s halfway up the wall before he’s even blinked, nimbly scaling the height using little more than the narrow protrusions along the seam where two the two massive sheets of metal had been bolted and welded together as hand and footholds to haul herself up. When she reaches the circle of light that he’s providing for her, she slides her hand out along the wall, a few smacks with the heel of her palm loosening the edges of what he can now see is a well-camouflaged panel cut into the metal. 

 

He gives a nervous glance into the blackness of the corridor, imagining more soldiers and unfriendly scavengers lurking in the unseen places where the sound of her labor echoes—so he jumps a little when a cloth sack hits the sandy ground at his feet with a soft  _ whump.  _

 

“Light  _ steady _ , please,” Rey reprimands with her head still stuck inside the hidden compartment above him, her voice tinny and muffled. “Oh, excellent—tent poles. I lost two of mine in the last storm. Catch!”

 

Ben flinches forward to catch the bundle of narrow poles just in time, silencing their clattering by snatching them tightly to his chest.

 

“You’re certain we’re alone here?” he asks from between gritted teeth.

 

“ _ Here _ is nearly twenty thousand meters long, so no, not entirely,” she says, finally withdrawing her head to look down at him, “But it’s an hour to sundown. Any scavenger in their right mind is either preparing to camp out for the night cycle or will be making their way home towards the anterior of the ship. We approached from the the rear, and I don’t know  _ anyone _ who lives that far north of Niima.”

 

“And which are we doing?” Ben asks, quickly adjusting his hold on the poles to catch another lump of cloth, this one rolled and tied with a frayed length of rope. “Assuming you’re in your right mind, of course.”

 

The grin Rey aims down at him is sharp and broad, and it stops the breath in his chest for a moment, as though he has glimpsed a hidden blade on her hip; a weapon that could make easy work of any man. 

 

“A little of both,” is her reply, right before the rusty ledge she’s clinging to gives out.      

 

She’s nearly twenty feet up, and he doesn’t really have time to stop and evaluate how much damage a fall from that height is liable to do—but what he  _ can _ tell is that he won’t get there in time, not with how far back he’s standing from the wall. He knows it before the supplies in his arms hit the ground, before the helpless little yelp even fully leaves her mouth. 

 

In desperation, he flings out an arm.

 

Particles of dirt and rusted metal cascade down the wall from where her hands and feet scrabble frantically to find grip, and it’s almost funny to watch, those few seconds before it hits her that she  _ isn’t actually falling. _

 

“Ben?” she calls down, an uncharacteristic waver in her voice as she brings her arms to her chest almost protectively, feet still kicking and scraping the wall as she levitates roughly ten feet off the ground. “What—how—uh— _ Ben _ ?”

 

“One of those  _ fancy Jedi tricks _ , I believe you called them,” he replies, and experimentally, he gives his hand a little twist, something in his gut thrilling as her body slowly,  _ slowly _ rotates around to face him as she remains suspended in the air. He can’t help the little bubble of pride that rises into his chest at his first successful attempt at purposefully using this power of his—his first successful attempt at  _ controlling _ it. Perhaps all is not lost after all.

 

“Great,” Rey says, her voice a little thin, and Ben’s eyes snap back to her face. “Could you...put me down now?”

 

Oh. Right. He feels his face color slightly as he tries to modify the movement he used to turn her around, beckoning slightly with his fingers, drawing his arm downwards at the elbow, willing her to glide smoothly down toward him…

 

...to no effect.

 

“Hang on,” he grumbles, keeping his arm aloft as he strides toward her, standing just beneath beneath her floating form.

 

“Oh, Maker,” he hears her bemoan, and in an instant decides that dropping her would probably be a whole hell of a lot easier than whatever it was he was about to try next. 

 

“ _ Kriff! _ ” Rey shrieks, legs kicking out wildly as he abruptly releases his mental grip on her, enjoying the small act of reprisal a little more than he knows he ought to in that instant before her body comes crashing down.

 

He staggers only slightly as he catches her in his waiting arms, surprised at how substantial she feels considering the slightness of her frame; but he doesn’t have a lot of time to think on that as the utter shock on her face begins to clear. It is a bad time to realize that this is the closest look he’s had at her face yet, and that what he’d assumed was a fine speckling of dirt across her nose is actually a smattering of sun-browned freckles.

 

He expects her to explode at him, for the look on her face to morph into the kind of righteous fury he’s come to associate with her, for her to shove herself out of his arms and beat his chest and screech at him, “ _ Are you completely and utterly kriffing mad? _ ” 

 

But she doesn’t. It takes a moment for the paleness of her face to register, her wide eyes, the clenched muscle of her jaw, the way her hands clutch at the front of his robe rather than immediately pushing him away.

 

Maker, he actually  _ frightened _ her.  

 

He sets her down more gingerly than he might have before that realization, continuing to support her back with one arm as he slowly lowers her legs, and Rey expels a long, shaky breath as her boots meet the gritty sand and metal of the floor. He’s left feeling unexpectedly cold, the way one might feel when ripped from the warmth of their bed too early in the morning, despite the fact that he’d only been holding her for a matter of seconds. 

 

“I haven’t quite mastered the Force in four hours, believe it or not,” he says, in that half-defensive way he can’t seem to help but revert to, suddenly much too ashamed of himself to come out with a real apology. What was he thinking, toying with her like that? The girl who’d done nothing but save his neck over and over again?

 

“It’s alright,” she tells him, although she spends a little longer kneeling on the ground than is strictly necessary when she bends to retrieve some of the dropped supplies. “I mean, of course you wouldn’t, after everything—and you still stopped me from falling in the first place.” She looks up at him, an alarmingly earnest shine in her eyes. “That’s big.  _ Huge. _ ”

 

Because of course it’s alright. Of course she’s  _ proud _ of him. 

 

Of course she wouldn’t blame him, this girl who’d told him not three hours ago that she’s abandoning what little stability she has in this hellish desertscape to go on the run with him  _ because it’s the right thing to do. _

 

For the briefest instant, Ben thinks he might vomit. But he really doesn’t want to lose the hundred or so calories he’s eaten in the past day, so instead, he grits his teeth and snatches up the tent poles, roll of cloth, and sack before Rey can get to them, slinging them over his shoulders alongside the bulk of the gun he’s already carrying.

 

_ She’s _ supposed to be the death of  _ him _ , not the other way around.

 

**

 

They walk for a quarter of an hour more in relative silence, Rey leading the way through the labyrinth of darkened passages and once-enclosed chambers now accessible through walls that have been blasted or rusted away. They climb occasionally, ascending a few floors here and there via access ladders, struggling against the lopsided tilt of the floors the whole way. 

 

Ben gets the sense that she is deliberately slowing her pace to accommodate him, and he’d be offended if he weren’t so genuinely grateful for it. He imagines that Jedis are supposed to be the picture of endurance, able to traverse and survive conditions of any kind, but the weariness of his limbs and the painful gurgling of his stomach makes him suspect he hasn’t gone this long without proper nutrition and rest for quite some time.

 

Finally,  _ finally, _ Rey passes off the light to him in order to free up both hands, and to his alarm, sticks them into a narrow gap between the panels of a pneumatic door at the end of the corridor. Planting one foot on the frame, she pulls with all her might until the gap begins to widen slowly, slowly, inch by inch, fighting the stiff, disused mechanisms holding it shut until the doorway is wide enough for a person to squeeze through.

 

Throwing a glance at Ben, eyes narrowing as though running calculations in her head, Rey heaves it open another inch or two before taking back her handlight and stepping inside herself.

 

He thinks he might develop a complex if she keeps that up.

 

“Data storage,” she tells him as he squeezes through after her—and alright, it  _ is _ a tight fit, even after her adjustment—letting her light fall upon rows of barren metal shelves and computer casings emptied of their contents. Wind from the outside hums resonantly through some distant corridor, a ghostly imitation of the power systems that would have droned throughout this ship long ago. “What’s left of it, anyway. This whole level has been picked over since I was a kid; I figured we wouldn’t run into anyone up here. No one who’s just minding their own business, anyway. So if it sounds like we’ve got company, we’ll know what to do.” 

 

“Shoot anything that makes a sound. Got it,” Ben says, unable to keep the weariness from his voice as he sets his cargo down, blaster and all, and sinks down to the floor beside it with his back to a shelving unit. He tilts his head back to rest for one blessed second—but the feeling of eyes on him forces him to look back at Rey once more.

 

“‘ _ Shoot anything that makes a sound _ ’? Really?” she asks, the look on her face seemingly torn between horror and amusement in the semidarkness. “Is that what the Jedi are teaching these days?”

 

He knows she’s joking, and perhaps gently scolding him at the same time, but he can’t stop the grimace from settling over his features. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he tells her, voice a little sharper than he intends. 

 

Rey frowns, but merely sinks to one knee in the center of the small room and sets the light beside her on the floor, aiming it up so that its beam pools on the ceiling and throws a dim but useful glow to the four corners of the room. As she turns her attention instead to her dusty satchel, he thinks she’s decided to ignore him—not that he’d blame her—but a moment later she emerges and tosses him a vacuum-sealed packet, which he snatches out of the air beside his head with a startling precision that even surprises  _ him _ .

 

Rey gawps at him for an instant before shaking her head and seizing a pair of battered old goggles out of the bag and scrambling over to him on her knees. 

 

“What?” Ben asks somewhat defensively, pressing himself back against the shelf even more as he eyes the quarterstaff still slung over her back.

 

“Let me see that injury,” she demands, turning a dial that that illuminates a small light on the side of the goggles. “There is no  _ humanly possible way _ that you should be capable of that kind of movement, not with the state your ribs were in when I examined them last night.”

 

Kriff. Between the headache, the hunger, the stiffness from perching on the back of a speeder all day, and the general chaos of being  _ shot _ at, he’d nearly forgotten about his damn ribs, which more than emphasizes her point that  _ something _ clearly isn’t right. And to tell the truth, he’s more than a little afraid to find out what.

 

Ben squints and raises a hand to shield his eyes from the sudden light in his face. “Is blinding me supposed to help?” 

 

The snark doesn’t throw her. “I don’t know, would it make you more compliant?” Rey asks, waving the light a little closer and forcing him to turn his head to the side to avoid it. “Come on,” she adds, “This might be the only chance we get to recuperate for a while. If you’re dying, I’d like to have a heads up first.”

 

Ben finally gets a hand over the light and blinks a few times in relief. “ _ Fine _ ,” he enunciates pointedly, and with the hand covering the light, gives it a slow, deliberate push away from his face. He slides out of the sleeves of his robe reluctantly, noticing the slight chill that has begun to tinge the air inside the ship, separated from the blistering light of the sun. With no belt to speak of anymore, he simply undoes the cloth ties of his tunic and shrugs that off as well before reaching for the hem of the undershirt beneath it and pulling it over his head.

 

Rey shines the light on to his midsection and  _ gasps. _

 

Laid out as he’d been during her initial examination, Ben hadn’t really gotten a good look at the injury when it was fresh; he remembers seeing the angry purple and black edges of deeply ruptured capillaries, and at the time, just feeling the pain had been more than enough of a diagnosis for him. 

 

The skin now illuminated by Rey’s light looks almost unblemished at first glance. Only a faded, mottled yellow splotch remains at the very center of where his injury had once been; and as Ben places a hand to the area in shock, he notices only a general kind of tenderness to the area, nothing like the stabbing pain that had left him breathless with even the smallest movement.

 

“Ben, this is...” Rey whispers, wide eyes catching the light in her hands and almost shining with awe, but apparently unable to think of the word to describe  _ what _ this is, exactly. She reaches out towards him, fingers just barely brushing the back of the hand he covers the remains of his bruise with, ghosting downward to the skin beneath his ribs.

 

He braces himself for her touch this time.  _ Don’t listen, _ he commands himself.  _ Don’t listen. Don’t. _

 

“I didn’t know this was possible,” she finishes, and jerks her hand away suddenly as though only just realizing where it had gone of its own accord. The chill in the air makes itself known across his skin once more, like a neglected third companion who has been waiting for the opportunity to interject. 

 

“I’m afraid—I’m afraid I don’t much about the Jedi,” Rey admits, casting her eyes down as though this is some great failing on her part, “I can’t imagine what it must be like, having abilities like this that keep emerging, not knowing what to expect or how to use them. I don’t know how to help.”

 

Ben reaches for his shirt, suddenly uncomfortable exposed in the cooling air. “If you do anything more for me today, you’ll probably drop dead,” he grumbles, and the corners of her mouth twitch with a patient kind of amusement. 

 

Rey finally tears her eyes away from the healed bruise as his stomach disappears beneath the hem of his shirt, instead flicking them up to his hairline, raising her light to the wound at his temple at the same time that she reaches out with her other hand to gingerly smooth some hair away from his face for a better look. Her touch is so light that she’s managing to hold a lock of hair away without even really touching him, as though skin-to-skin contact would burn the side of her hand like an engine she hadn’t let cool down.

 

_ Hold on properly _ , she’d admonished him on the back of her speeder, and he nearly bites his tongue to prevent himself from throwing similar words back at her, staring at a spot over her shoulder to distract himself from the closeness of her face. He feels certain that he would trade every bizarre ability he’s demonstrated over the past day for a single instance of contact that isn’t someone swinging a basket upside his head or the vise grip of a hand as they run for their lives. 

 

But he makes her uncomfortable enough already. He doesn’t need to read her mind to know that.

 

“This wound doesn’t look much different than it did this morning,” Rey murmurs, her brows drawing together in thought. “I won’t pretend to know how this whole healing thing works, but I wonder...if you could heal  _ this _ one the way you did your ribs _ … _ ”

 

Would it stifle the headache that’s been plaguing him since he woke up? Probably. Restore his memories? Doubtful. With the way his experiments with his abilities have been going today, he wouldn’t be surprised if he succeeded in turning his brain into mush rather than healing complex trauma. 

 

“The key to many of the Jedi’s abilities is said to be meditation,” Ben says, heaving a weary sigh. No memory of family, of a surname, of his training, of  _ anything _ in his life leading up to waking up in the brutal desert sun, but he’s apparently retained a youngling’s basic overview of history. “And no, I have no idea why I know that. But I do know that I’m going to be unconscious the instant my eyes close, so there’s no way I’m trying anything like that tonight.”

 

Rey lets his hair slip gently back into place. Has  _ anyone _ ever touched the side of his face before? Run their fingers through his hair? The Jedi take children for their training so young that they hardly remember their families, raise them to detach from emotion, from affection, from passion. He must be in his late twenties at least, from what the brief look at his reflection had told him. Any other man in his position would likely be able to assume that they’d at least  _ kissed _ someone in their lifetime...but Ben?

 

_ Aren’t there more pressing details you should be trying to remember?  _ he tries to scold himself, but  the uncertainty sits like a hot coal in his stomach all the same. 

 

“Eat,” Rey says, pressing the brick of green nutrients into his palm, “Then you can rest. I’ll rig up the tent as best I can in here; we’ll need to trap some warmth so we don’t freeze overnight.”  

 

True to her word, she has erected a small canvas structure between the rusty old tent poles by the time Ben has choked down his rations with as large a swallow of water as he dares, willing his body to last on that meager hydration until the morning. The bedroll Rey had retrieved from the emergency cache for him is dusty and worn almost as thin as his robes, but it at least covers the cold, unforgiving metal so that his body heat isn’t sucked directly into the floor.

 

“We’ll sleep in shifts,” Rey says somewhat quickly as Ben pauses between the canvas flaps of the tent to look at her. “I’ll wake you in about two hours. That way, no one can take us by surprise.”

 

_ That way you don’t have to sleep next to me _ , he thinks. In a way, he knows this is better, knows that the sheer awkwardness of laying next to a girl he hardly knows might have kept him awake through the short time he had to replenish his energy—but even so, the small rejection stings just enough to be embarrassing. 

 

“Don’t worry about me,” Rey says when he lingers for just another moment too long, apparently mistaking his hesitation for some kind of altruistic suggestion that she ought to sleep before him. “It’d take me hours to fall asleep even on a good night.” 

But when Ben accepts his dismissal, drawing a layer of scratchy fabric over himself as he lies back, he sees Rey’s silhouette slump in the dim, diffused glow of the handlight, hunching over to support her head in one hand, immediately losing the verve she’d shown to him to mask her own exhaustion.

  
He almost  _ does _ sit back up to demand that she go to sleep at once, but the weight of the day pulls him under so quickly that there is no time to say anything at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAN. Look, remind me never to comment about my supposed posting schedule again. I'm so sorry to take so long! 
> 
> This is getting so much more UST heavy than even I anticipated because of these bumbling idiots. To quote a famous scholar, "You're gonna suffer, but you're gonna be...happy about it?"


	7. Chapter 7

Every shell on the pristine white beach is the same shell—the same ridged fan shape, the same color of sunbleached taupe. If examined closely, even the same dainty chip along the edge.

 

But the dreaming mind never examines closely; it builds worlds of impressions and half-connected memories, substituting feeling for fine detail in ways that the dreamer often never notices until long after they wake.

 

And so Rey observes the ships of Unkar Plutt’s junkyard bobbing serenely offshore of her island somewhat dispassionately. She’s up to her ankles in the tepid water, staff at the ready, poised to strike at one of the indistinct fish-shaped blurs streaking by beneath the surface, and she can’t afford to get carried away sightseeing if she wants to catch dinner by nightfall. 

 

Hunger stalks her even in her sleep, but at least in these dreams there is water for her thirst.

 

“You can’t drink seawater,” a voice tells her, sounding a little affronted that she doesn’t know this. 

 

There is no splash when she drops her staff and turns, perhaps because she has never really seen a large enough amount of water at one time to have any kind of basis for the feeling.

 

She’s dimly aware of a part of her that’s lucid enough to be embarrassed that she has conjured him up like this, in the most private center of her subconscious. But the mind is insistent that way, retracing the well-worn pathways of recently fired neurons dedicated to memorizing the warmth of him pressed against her back, the solid strength of arms catching her, a broad hand palming her waist. She’s embarrassed, but not surprised. Never in her life has she been close to someone in these ways, and until now, she’s counted it a victory. 

 

Dream-Ben looks uncomfortable. “This, erm, this isn’t what the ocean looks like, either.” He is avoiding looking directly at her and shifting from foot to foot as though he’d come upon her doing something much more embarrassing, like bathing in the water rather than fishing in it. Oddly, she swears she sees the tips of his ears flare red at the same time that the thought occurs to her in that strange, half-manifested way of dreams. 

 

Rey frowns, both at his words and his behavior. “I thought you didn’t remember anything.”

 

“About  _ myself. _ This, though...” he comes closer to where she stands at the edge of the water. “This isn’t right.”

 

“What are you  _ talking _ about?” Rey asks.

 

But in that same instant the water around her ankles suddenly surges past her, breaking into thin, foamy froth farther up on the shore before receding again, sucking away the mud and sand between her bare toes in a way that makes her jump backwards, afraid she will be pulled out to sea as well. The staff that she dropped in the shallow water begins to float away from her, dragged along by the outgoing surf, and she stumbles forward in a panic to snatch it up.  

 

The once-serene body of clear water stretching out to the horizon has gone opaque now, a deep steel blue that swells toward the shore, the horizon glittering as sunlight touches the peak of each choppy wave. They break endlessly against one another in a chorus of a thousand voices roaring like a distant sandstorm, a promise of wrath behind the scintillating beauty. 

 

_ Tremble _ , that godly roar seems to command.

 

Shock jolts Rey awake with the unfamiliar tang of brine in her nose. She doesn’t know  _ why _ she knows the name for that scent either, and that almost frightens her more.  

 

She wasn’t meant to be asleep—her back is still pressed against the shelving unit outside the makeshift tent she set up, neck sore beyond all belief from letting her head droop unsupported to one side—but the images fading all too quickly from her mind’s eye make it nearly impossible to summon up any kind of guilt.

 

A numbness begins to spread in her chest, the kind she usually only feels when the absent phantoms of her parents come too close to the surface of her thoughts; when she makes the mistake of trying to conjure a face from the depth of her memory, or the echo of a voice, or even the silhouette of the ship that left her behind. 

 

Tears blur at the edges of her vision as her eyes take in the bleak metal of her surroundings, the shadowy corners of the small room where her meager light doesn’t reach. She’s lost her ocean to the morning a hundred times before, but never  _ that _ ocean _. _ Never in eighteen years had her own imagination shown her such a wonder, never imagined it could look so  _ alive _ . 

 

There is no doubt in her mind that this vision was a glimpse of a  _ true _ ocean—and she hadn’t been ready. Hadn’t looked long enough, looked  _ hard _ enough, hadn’t had time to commit to memory every alien color and sound before realizing she’d never see it again. 

 

_ How? _ she wants to scream,  _ How could this happen, how could I have seen— _

 

But as her gaze falls on the rough fabric of the tent, a realization stops cold the wild panic of her thoughts. 

 

_ You can’t drink seawater, _ the Ben in her dream had said, and in that instant of semi-lucid awareness, she’d been impressed with the ability of her own subconscious to perfectly recreate that tone of reluctant superiority that is such a hallmark of the real life Ben.

 

Now Rey is not so certain that the credit belongs to her.

 

And  _ yes, _ this line of reasoning is bloody crazy, she knows it, but for kriff’s sake this is a man who stopped her from falling and breaking a leg by catching her  _ with his mind _ , who is supposed to have the power to impose his will on anyone he chooses, who experienced what would have been nearly a month’s worth of healing in just under a day. It’s hard to say  _ what _ really counts as crazy anymore.

 

She’s not sure what she expects to find out just from laying eyes on him, but her body is moving of its own accord now, reaching out towards the flap of tent in front of her and inching forward on her knees. If he’s still asleep, she reasons, there’s a chance she can tell herself she’s just going a bit batty from all the stress of the past day, that it really was all just a dream of no particular significance. 

 

But Ben is sitting up when she draws back the flap, hunched over with his head cradled in his hands, long fingers splayed wide and laced into his hair. His head jerks up at the movement, and it’s his eyes that tell her what she needs to know before he even opens his mouth. 

 

Shame. It’s an emotion Rey rarely comes across here in the desert, where dignity and decency can never matter more than survival. But she still recognizes it in his eyes, written plainly across his pale face.

 

“Rey—” Ben starts, sounding haggard, but she drops the flap almost accidentally, standing and backing away on shaking legs with one hand clapped tight to her mouth.

 

_ No, no, no, no, no, no, no. _ A part of her mind is focused only maintaining that steady chant, as if doing so will keep her from fully realizing the significance of what she’s just learned. Ben was in her  _ dream _ , which means he was in her  _ mind _ , which means…

 

The tent flap twitches to one side as Ben ducks out gracelessly, struggling to untangle his long legs from the disheveled blankets. The whole  _ room _ is too small for him, to say nothing of the little tent Rey had managed to prop up. 

 

“Listen to me,” he sputters, bothering with  _ no _ pretenses whatsoever, “—I wasn’t trying to—I haven’t been able to  _ control  _ it—”

 

Rey feels the remaining blood in her face drain away. This is not the panicked confusion of someone who has only just realized they have breached the privacy of another person’s mind, but the guilty babbling of someone who has finally been caught—which means this is not the first time this has happened, not the first time he’s  _ done _ this. 

 

Something tickles Rey’s cheek, and she swipes at it to find that the tears that had been blurring her vision upon waking have spilled over—and not in one graceful tear, either, but in a messy wash that pools beneath her eyes in a thin sheen.  

 

“How long?” she demands, mortified to find her voice thick with humiliation, “How long have you been able to get into my head?” 

 

“I didn’t mean to keep it a secret,” he insists, taking a step forward imploringly as though his words will be more convincing with less distance between them. “I didn’t know what was happening at first, and I was afraid—”

 

“ _ How long?”  _ she nearly shrieks, for an instant forgetting their need for stealth, and the shrillness of her own voice in the small, silent space alarms even her. Maker, if he’d been doing it from the beginning...she’d been a girl alone with a strange man in her house for the first time. She’d been embarrassed enough to know that he’d probably seen her blushing in the dim glow, that he’d probably felt the tension in her body as they’d been pressed together on the back of her speeder. To have him reading every tentative, vulnerable thought...every naive worry...

 

The dark gaze searching her face seems too piercing now, too  _ probing _ , and she covers her own eyes like a child, whirling around to face the wall as though that will be able to block him out.

 

“Since the Outpost,” Ben admits, but no feeling of relief comes at his words knowing how many hours had passed since the two of them fled Niima, how many of her fleeting thoughts may still have been his to intrude upon. 

 

And of course, the few that he  _ hadn’t  _ heard he could be hearing right now, as Rey’s traitor brain calls forth all of her most private thoughts, obsessing more over each one the more she knows she needs to suppress it, like some sort of cruel joke.

 

“I wasn’t  _ trying _ to listen,” he says, “And I’m not doing it now, I swear. I thought I was figuring out how to stop it, but I must have lost control over it in my sleep. I’m  _ sorry _ .” 

 

Rey whips back around at that, staring back at him with hard, wild eyes. “So you were just  _ never _ going to tell me? You were just going to hope you could figure it out on your own and use me as a test droid to practice your creepy kriffing  _ mind tricks  _ on _? _ ” 

 

“I didn’t  _ say _ that,” Ben snarls, and despite having lived less than two days with him, Rey is hardly surprised that he’s not the kind of person to let the fact that he’s in the middle of grovelling for forgiveness stop him from picking a fight over semantics. “We needed to keep running, and I didn’t exactly know which part of  _ running for our lives _ made the best segue into the subject.”

 

Anger is rarely productive but it feels a lot better than humiliation, so Rey grabs onto it with both hands, letting it crystallize around her to protect the weaker parts within. 

 

“You had no right,” she hisses, “ _ No right _ to keep that from me. What did you think I’d do, just leave you to die in the middle of the bloody desert if you told me?” 

 

A muscle in Ben’s jaw twitches, the slightest hesitation before his reply almost an answer in itself. “You’re not taking it particularly well now.” 

 

“Because you lied to me!” Rey bursts out. To be so mistrusted after all she’s done for him over the past day—it’s sand in the wound, no matter how outrageous she knows it is to somehow feel  _ hurt _ in the midst of her anger.   

 

“I made a mistake,” Ben somehow manages to plead even with his teeth still gritted together, unable to conceal his annoyance—or perhaps his desperation, but Rey is not feeling particular charitable in her assumptions just now—at being misunderstood. “But I know I already make you uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to frighten you any more than—”

 

“ _Frighten_ me?” Rey cuts him off in disbelief. “I’m not kriffing _afraid_ of you. What makes you think you make me...” 

 

But she halts, suddenly so mortified that she’s rendered speechless. It’s one thing to know in the abstract that he’s been inside her head, and quite another for him to throw one of her own private thoughts back in her face.  _ Calm down _ , the still-rational part of her mind urges, but her hands tighten into quivering fists at her sides.

 

Ben reads her silence all wrong. “I understand. I do,” he tells her. “You’ve been by yourself and the men of this planet are—” 

 

She can hardly believe his gall.

 

“Don’t you dare,” Rey interrupts, the deadly hiss of her voice almost unrecognizable even to herself. Ben falls silent at once, with the look of a man who hasn’t realized he’s stepped on a mine until he hears the  _ click _ . “Don’t you dare tell me what  _ you _ supposedly know about the men of this planet like you didn’t take it straight out of my head. Don’t you dare act like you deserve some sort of credit for  _ understanding _ .” 

 

His continued silence does nothing to improve the situation, but neither can she imagine anything he could say that would lessen her anger in this moment—not even an apology. Too full up of things she wants to shout at him to actually  _ pick _ one, Rey settles for snatching her quarterstaff off the ground, roughly snagging the strap of her lighted goggles with one finger at the same time.

 

This finally jolts Ben to speech, a trace of panic coming across his features. “Where—where are you going?”

 

Rey shoulders the staff, looping her goggles around her neck before pulling them up to rest on her forehead. “I can’t talk about this anymore. I need a minute to myself. I’m not abandoning you, if that’s what you’re wondering.” 

 

To his credit, it looks like he swallows whatever biting response she knows must have initially popped into his head. He draws himself up slightly, and only then does she realize how hunched over he’s been this entire time; whether from shame or discomfort or simple awkwardness in his own body, she can’t really tell, but seeing the dark waves at the top of his head nearly brush the ceiling in this glorified closet sobers her for a moment. Despite their argument, she’s rather glad she’s on his side of this whole debacle. As capable of a fighter as she is, Rey isn’t sure she’d fancy going one on one with someone like him. 

 

“You shouldn’t have to leave. I’ll go,” he says, dark eyes glimmering with seriousness in the meager glow from her handlight, but Rey moves to the doorway to block him.

 

“Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll be lost the minute you turn the corner. I’ve been coming here for years,” she tells him. 

 

Her gaze flicks to their small pile of supplies, her pack and the blaster sitting by the end of the shelf where she was supposed to have been keeping watch before falling asleep perhaps not even one hour ago. She tries to blink away the heavy feeling of exhaustion pulling at the corners of her eyes. 

 

“You’ve got a weapon and the rations. And if you don’t believe I’m coming back for you, you’d better believe I’m coming back for those _. _ So  _ stay _ ,” she commands, hoping the tone of her voice covers up the fact that she’d listed those facts partially for her own peace of mind. 

 

How stupid she feels worrying about his safety at a time like this, but there it is. 

 

“A few minutes, that’s all. Please,” she says, adding the last bit as she turns away to shove the doors apart. She switches on the light at the side of her goggles and wades into the dark.

 

**

 

She expects to feel relief at finally being able to leave behind the massive burden that Ben represents, even if only for a few minutes. 

 

Ben, an amnesiac Jedi whose head trauma has left him a mercurial timebomb with no real understanding of how to use his powers. 

 

Ben, who crash landed in her desert with no food, no supplies, no water rations of his own. 

 

Ben, a wanted man who’d attracted the blasterfire of a platoon’s worth of stormtroopers within hours of crawling to her door. 

 

But the problems don’t evaporate just because she’s put some distance between them. All it really means is that she’s alone now. Alone by  _ choice _ , despite a whole life spent wishing for an end to her solitude. What kind of sense does that make? 

 

But she also knows that she just couldn’t  _ look _ at him a second longer, couldn’t meet his gaze and be in that room knowing her every thought might very well be broadcast for him to hear, no matter how personal, how petty, how insignificant. Even though he’d  _ claimed _ he hadn’t been doing it then, she’s seen for herself how unstable his powers can be. He’d invaded her dreams by  _ accident _ , for kriff’s sake, just by falling asleep and losing whatever focus he’d been maintaining to keep himself out of her head.

 

And that dream…

 

Rey halts where she stands, air rushing out of her in something much too close to a whimper of pain for her to feel comfortable admitting to. Eighteen years dreaming of the ocean, and her fantasies hadn’t even been close—and her glimpse of the real thing had been so  _ short. _ It felt as though she’d passed her mother in a packed market and not recognized her until the instant she was out of sight, disappeared into the impassable mass of the crowd. Cruelly snatched away before she’d even realized what a precious thing had appeared before her.

 

Rey takes a breath, amazed that the oxygen fills her rather than escaping from the gaping hole she feels in her chest. And she pushes on.

 

It’s a few more minutes of careful descent before Rey realizes that her feet are carrying her back to the speeder purely out of habit. A practical enough idea, to go down and check on it before looping back to the data storage room where she’d left Ben. 

 

She really  _ wouldn’t _ leave him behind, she realizes, and the thought actually manages to surprise her the slightest bit. It’s not that Rey considers herself particular ruthless—there is a difference between acting out of self-interest and acting out of selfishness, however small, and it’s a line she never intends to cross—but it occurs to her that’s she never actually had to  _ forgive _ anybody before. 

 

Grudges between the residents of Niima Outpost are most often settled with quick bouts of reactionary violence, inelegant tussles with fists and blunt weapons, or on occasion by threat of ration deprivation at the hands of Unkar Plutt. The junkboss rarely has patience for any kind of ongoing feuds between his scavengers taking up time and energy that could be spent turning him a profit. Either you hated each other enough to let it kill you, or you just let it go and carried on surviving.

 

Most disagreements she’s ever had—if you can count catching someone filching spare parts from your satchel or trying to grab the veg-meat pack out of your hand as a “disagreement”—have ended with the other party sent packing with a good wallop of her quarterstaff and no love lost between the two of them. There was no worry about how Rey might face them later, about how she might have said something she regretted, about how one or both of them might have to swallow their pride and apologize in order for life to proceed smoothly once again.

 

There was only one big thing she’d ever forgiven in her life, and she hadn’t even actually had a chance to  _ do _ it yet. She’d imagined countless ways she might forgive the family she  _ knew _ lurked out there in the galaxy somewhere, hundreds of perfect words to tell them how hard it had been for her, how she had struggled, but how she’d always known there was a reason they’d left her here.

 

Left her. Not abandoned, never abandoned. That word was too accusatory, too harsh for the people who hadn’t had a chance to explain themselves yet. That was no way to live, denying them the benefit of the doubt, the bitterness of that assumption serving no purpose other than to poison their eventual reunion. How foolish she would feel when she looked into the careworn face of a mother, a father, a sibling who had never given up on her as they recounted the dangers that had kept them apart. How  _ petty  _ she would feel for assuming the worst of them.        

 

For so long she’d imagined there could be no one else worthy of expending that kind of emotional energy on—certainly none of the dusty lowlifes she calls neighbors. But when she tries to picture herself cutting her losses, throwing a leg over the speeder and taking off into the night, not even the lingering sting of her humiliation can cover the painful twinge of protest in her heart. 

 

This is the lesson, she realizes, that she must forgive the lonely little girl within herself for being slow to learn. This life of scavenging breeds absolutes that simply don’t mesh with the world outside her desert prison. Not all fights are to the end. Sometimes we must leave simply so we have the chance to return. 

 

The heart demands balance.

 

**

 

Having cooled down some, she feels bad leaving Ben too much longer, but checking on the speeder _is_ a solid idea and honestly, a little more time to stew might not be undeserved in the wake of some of his comments. _I know_ _I already make you uncomfortable—_ the _nerve_ of him, really. 

 

In his defense, the poor man has had a lifetime of social interactions wiped from his memory.

 

She goes back and forth in her mind like this the rest of the way down to the spot by the entrance where she’d parked several hours ago (perhaps even less than several, if the bone-tired feeling weighing her down like an extra backpack is anything to go by), going through their argument bit by bit and evaluating each statement in order of importance, doing her best to look at things from Ben’s point of view. 

 

This, perhaps, is why it fails to occur to her to switch off her goggles, announcing her presence with a little bobbing beam of light as she nears the spot where the blue desert moonlight reaches back into the darkness of the ship, spilling in from the enormous openings of the thrusters. 

 

Rey nearly turns back around as her eyes take in the silhouetted shape of her speeder exactly where she’d left it, but something about the picture seems off to her, so she continues on a few steps forward. The beam of the light on her goggles isn’t as powerful as a handlight, meant more for illuminating the space in front of her face while leaving her hands free to tinker, so she has to get quite a bit closer before the base of the speeder comes into view and she sees what it is that caught her attention.

 

The cargo net on the side facing Rey lays limp on the ground, obviously sliced open with some kind of sharp implement. The few items she’d left in there—nothing more than a sack containing the few pieces of extra clothing she keeps on hand for extra protection in the event of bad weather and some rope—are spilled beside the speeder. 

 

She whirls around, one hand going for the staff hanging on her shoulder—but not before a hard shove in the back sends her sprawling to the ground. 

 

It’s more sand than metal this close to the entrance, but the sudden impact to her knees and palms sends an unpleasant jolt through her bones at the same time that something unexpectedly yanks backwards around her torso, forcing an ugly grunt of pain out of her before the the pressure disappears with a sharp  _ snap _ .

 

_ No _ , Rey thinks, a cold blast of panic washing over her as though she’d just been thrown naked into the frigid desert night. She grasps desperately at the place where her shoulder meets her neck, now stinging harshly where the strap of her quarterstaff once rested against her skin.

 

She scrambles to try and regain her footing, but whoever is behind her still has the upper hand. She feels the heel of a boot press against her hip and give her another rough push, this time landing on her backside in the rough, gritty sand. Finally facing her attacker, she squints up, expecting to see the gleaming white plastoid plated armor of one of the stormtroopers that had pursued them earlier that morning—but instead, she sees nothing.

 

That is to say, there is  _ nothing  _ on the face aimed down at her—if one can even call it a face. It is totally blank, a featureless canvas of hardened, segmented chitin, almost like a blast door that has been drawn down over the front of the creature’s head. 

 

The various faceless Melitto of Jakku have always privately unnerved Rey, even for all the brevity and indifference with which they typically conduct business—but one look at the blood-red robes she has frequently seen skulking around the fringes of town, toting bizarrely altered weapons to the criminal element of Niima Outpost, tells her  _ exactly _ which Melitto this is even without the benefit of a unique face.

 

Sarco Plank looms above her, holding her staff in one hand, the sliced halves of the strap dangling loosely from either end. A large knife hangs sheathed in his belt. In the other hand, the insectoid grips a blaster with an enormously chunky brick-like attachment jammed onto the barrel—a Trandoshan tripler, if Rey remembers her gossip correctly. She’s never been interested much in blasters, but from what little she knows this one is supposed to be as deadly as it is stupid looking. And the thing  _ looks _ pretty damned stupid.

 

“The Jedi, girl,” Sarco Plank demands as he stares down at her—though Rey isn’t sure it can really be called  _ staring _ if the person hasn’t got eyes—the deep electronic growl of his vocoder-produced voice an ominous monotone. “I know you are together. It will be easier if you simply take me to him.”

 

“And why would I make things easier for you?” Rey snaps, doing her best to sound a lot more vicious than she feels, weaponless at the feet of the bounty hunter-turned-arms dealer.

 

“Easier for you. Not me,” Sarco replies, in that same infuriatingly unreadable tone. Rey swears he sounds almost  _ amused.  _ He uncurls his gloved fingers from around her staff, weighing it up and down in his palm as though giving it consideration. 

 

“Not a bad choice of weapon, girl. Though it would benefit from some additions,” he tells her, tilting his head left and then right in a rather unsettling manner. “A shame it was so easy to take. I was told you are regarded as quite the terror among Plutt’s scavengers…but I suppose sand rats are easy to scare.”

 

Rey grimaces, but the muzzle of that ridiculous-looking blaster is still level with the point directly between her eyes, so she remains still. “He’s not here,” she says, voice hard.

 

Sarco tilts his head once again. “A word of advice,” he says, “The bounty calls for the Jedi alive, but it says nothing about  _ you _ . You may want to consider that before—oh.” 

 

He breaks off, head tilting in the opposite direction, but this time as if  _ listening _ . 

 

“How nice of you to save me a trip,  _ Jedi. _ ”

  
And in a whirl of blood-red fabric, he turns and fires his blaster at a tall figure just barely visible in the darkness behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want you all to know I take no pleasure from leaving cliffhangers - but I just wanted to get the chapter OUT, you know? I've taken some liberties here with the character of [Sarco Plank](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sarco_Plank) since it's hard to tell if the filmmakers are EVER going to use him, despite the character being marketed heavily before the release of TFA...but I just don't know how I'm supposed to ignore a bounty hunter who has a beef with Luke Skywalker coincidentally living on Jakku at the same time as Rey. Coincidentally. Heh. Sure. 
> 
> All of your comments and kudos are so appreciated, even if sometimes I just don't get a chance to respond. You are all wonderful c:


	8. Chapter 8

A lifetime of Jedi training imparts a number of skills on to the learner; virtues deemed essential to those who wish to channel the light side of the Force. 

 

Duty. Harmony. Peace. Understanding. Discipline. But the Jedi cannot  _ teach _ connection where none exists.  

 

In the shadows, a hand comes up, spurred by something beyond learning, beyond instinct. Something in its purest form.   

 

The Force flows through.

 

**

 

Ben moves so fast that Rey isn’t quite sure what wrenches the scream from her—a desperate attempt to warn him, or the blast of sand that erupts from the ground as the bolt hits scarcely five feet to her right, deflected with nothing more than a wave of his hand. 

 

She scrambles sideways, trying to evade the shower of dirt and grain before hastily reclaiming her footing and hustling to her feet behind the back of Sarco Plank.

 

Not one to pass up such a generous opportunity, Rey _lunges_ for her staff, now held seemingly forgotten at the bounty hunter’s side—but the arm clutching it flies up, the long pole whirling and catching her under the jaw with a vicious uppercut. She rears backwards, vision blackened from the sheer shock of the blow for several agonizing seconds before the pain hits her, every nerve ending above her neck shrieking and lighting up their connections like a pane of shattering glass. 

 

Somehow—miraculously—Rey remains on her feet, but only after taking one, two, three swaying, staggering steps that promise collapse should she lean in wrong direction. More than a little fuzzy from her blow but clear enough to be  _ bloody pissed _ about getting cracked in the head with her own weapon, Rey tilts her weight forward, using her momentum to charge him again, unable to change course as the hideous muzzle of that blaster rises up to take aim at her.

 

The ground suddenly disappears from beneath her feet and the shot screams under her at the last second, the dim space lighting up plasma-red before the bolt slams into the dusty metal wall instead. Rey hits the ground gracelessly but unharmed, breath whooshing out of her on impact.

 

With no air to gather a shout, Rey chokes on Ben’s name, unable to cry out in protest as he steps forward to engage Sarco. 

 

“Jedi, always fighting like  _ cowards _ ,” Plank’s voice snarls out of the vocoder around his neck. 

 

“I’m not the one who disarmed my opponent before attacking,” Ben fires back. 

 

Rey struggles to draw in the oxygen she needs to stand up, to get back into the fight, silently cursing Ben for throwing her thirty damned feet away from the action—too far to do anything but watch as both figures move to collide.

 

Sarco raises the blaster again, but with one almost impatient gesture from Ben his arm flies straight up in an eerily unnatural movement. The bolt fires into the cavernous ceiling above them, and then Ben is upon him.

 

Perhaps sensing that his opponent is too close to engage with that abominably long blaster anyway, the blaster falls from Sarco Plank’s grip and he instead brings Rey’s quarterstaff whirling forward again with deadly speed, cracking across Ben’s shoulder as Ben turns to defend his vulnerable front. 

 

Rey pushes to her feet, eyes locked on Sarco’s fallen blaster lying discarded as the dueling pair exchange blows. There’s no way she’d be able to slip by the both of them unnoticed in order to grab the thing...but... _ the blaster! _ she thinks, hope and dread dawning on her simultaneously as she remembers the weapon Ben had wrested from a stormtrooper during their escape that morning.

 

_ Please. Please don’t have left everything behind in the storage room _ , she silently pleads, eyes desperately scanning the shadowy area where Ben had been standing before Sarco discovered him. Bending her knees to stay low, Rey makes a quick dash closer to her speeder hoping for a better vantage point. 

 

There in the darkness she thinks she sees the shapeless lump of her satchel, and....is that the handle of the blaster sticking up beside it? Her heart begins pounding with painful urgency in her chest. 

 

“The sand-rat is fleeing,” Rey hears Sarco Plank’s voice taunt, and her attention is jerked suddenly back to the pair of struggling figures. No,  _ no _ —she thinks as Ben whips his head around to look for her, his momentary distraction allowing the bounty hunter to rip the quarterstaff they’d been battling for control over out of his hands. 

 

“Even  _ she _ knows you Jedi are useless without your sabers,” Sarco goes on, and the trace of uncertainty and panic that she can see on Ben’s face even from this distance hurts almost as much as the sight of Sarco then raising the stolen staff and raining down a succession of fierce blows to his sides, his chest, his leg. Ben stumbles to a knee, ducking out of the way just in time to avoid a strike to the head, the quarterstaff whistling through the air and colliding with the ground instead.

 

“Go on—save yourself, scavenger,” Sarco calls out mockingly, and in that instant, it dawns on Rey. The advanced Melitto senses that more than make up for the lack of eyes on his chitinous face have detected her motion, have sensed her creeping away from the fight—but have totally misinterpreted her intent.

 

_ He thinks I’m running away. _

 

Struck with inspiration, she cries out, “I’m sorry! I thought I could could do this—but I can’t!”

 

But hoping against  _ hope _ that this works, she screws up her face and thinks as  _ loudly _ as she can, focusing all of her attention at the side of his head. 

 

_ Ben! I’m going for the blaster—I see where you dropped it! Can you hear me? _

 

For an agonizing moment, nothing happens but the continued exchange of blows, Ben now desperately holding on to the end of the quarterstaff and trying to wrench it away from Sarco. 

 

_ Ben! Shout if you understand! _

 

A beat passes, but then he lets out a guttural cry _ ,  _ shoving back at Sarco Plank with all of his strength and nailing the bounty hunter in the side of the head with the end of the staff. It sounds like it very well could be nothing more than a typical shout of frustration during a fight, but Rey  _ has _ to take her chance.

 

She bolts forward towards the shadowy area leading farther inside the ship, legs and lungs burning like bare flesh on scrap metal that’s been baking in the midday desert sun. Seeing the bags and blaster in range, she drops and slides across the gritty, sandy floor, snatching the blaster up and trying to get her hands around the thing as fast as possible despite never having used a weapon of this sort before. 

 

But there’s no time to overthink the process. _Just pull the trigger, right?_

 

“Duck!” she simultaneously shouts at Ben with her voice  _ and _ her thoughts, raising the blaster as Ben heeds her warning and hits the floor. She tightens her finger around the trigger and—

 

Nothing. 

 

_ The kriffing  _ safety, Rey realizes, at the same moment Sarco Plank seems to sense what has just gone on, and with a roar of anger that chills the very blood in Rey’s veins, throws down the staff and rips his forgotten blaster out of the sand. 

 

Ben lunges for his legs, but the shot goes off before the pair of them tumble to the ground together. Rey cringes out of the way, but too late—everything before her is bathed in the red light, hot and crackling as the plasma energy rips through the air before reaching her.

 

She burns.

 

**

 

Ben watches in horror as Rey’s slight figure crumples backward into the darkness.

 

As she disappears from view, something happens inside him that he can’t quite explain. Like the feeling of a dislocated bone being set back into place, or perhaps more like the release of a restraint that had been holding back one of his limbs as he attempted to fight, he feels the freedom of full motion, full  _ potential _ , surge through him like fresh, hot blood.

 

Leaning over Sarco Plank, it’s not clear to him exactly how this creature’s physiology functions—but the thing has a neck, and his vision narrows until that’s all he can see. He feels the treacherous insectoid struggle to lift the blaster again, the muzzle of that absurd weapon nudging against Ben’s side, but he flattens his hand and the body beneath him goes rigid, all attempts at retaliation smothered by his influence.

 

Curling his other hand into a fist, he  _ tightens _ it, and a low sputtering sound emanates not from the bounty hunter’s vocoder, but from within the throat itself. Practically quivering with anger and from the exertion of using this kind of power, Ben jerks his arm forward so that Sarco is lifted into the air, feet kicking and gloved hands clawing at the pressure on his throat as Ben stands before him. 

 

“They—said—you were—a  _ Jedi _ ,” the choked words emerge from Sarco Plank’s vocoder with great difficulty. And though his failing voice is unable to complete the thought, Ben understands him perfectly.

 

He doesn’t need his missing memories to know that this is not the way Jedi behave, even in combat. The Jedi are diplomats, are trained to subdue rather than kill wherever possible, to make arrests rather than passing judgement themselves. But the thought of Rey’s fallen body behind him in the dark makes him tighten his fist even further.

 

“Yes,” Ben says in a low voice, “I’ve been told the same thing.”

 

Ben’s eyes flick to Rey’s speeder, and a snippet of conversation comes back to him from some point in the day, when she’d been telling him all about the security measure she’d hooked up for it, how she armed the system every time she left the bike on its own for any period of time.

 

He swings his arm towards it, sending Sarco Plank’s body sailing into the side of the speeder. Electricity crackles out in blue shocks that wrack the bounty hunter’s body in great, violent spasms, before his form drops limply into the sand beside it.

 

Wasting not a second longer on their attacker, Ben nearly trips over himself closing the distance separating him from Rey’s prone form lying motionless beside the fallen blaster and her bag.  He falls to his knees beside her.

 

Too desperate to be careful, Ben grips Rey’s shoulder to roll her over onto her back—and the gasp of pain she lets out fills his lungs with breath once more, brings the feeling back to his fingertips, starts the beating of a heart he hadn’t realized had stopped.

 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers hoarsely, pulling his hand away from the nasty-looking burn on her shoulder, blistering skin visible beneath a burned-away section of her tunic wrap. He can’t help but let his eyes roam over her, searching for other injuries...because Rey coming away from a blaster shot with nothing but a surface wound to the arm is too almost good to be true, too good of a thing to happen to  _ him _ . Without thinking, he grasps the side of her face in one broad palm, trying to direct her gaze to meet with his own. The question half forms on his lips, “Are you—?”

 

But he doesn’t need to ask. Stunned, battered, badly burned as she is, he can  _ feel _ that she’s alright in the subdued murmur of her thoughts. He can’t help hearing them, touching her like this, and frankly in this moment he couldn’t give a damn about trying to stay out of her head. 

 

“That...really kriffing hurt,” Rey mumbles, her eyes finally focusing and locking on his, and it occurs to him that the mossy-hazel color of them might be only trace of green that he’s seen on this whole kriffing planet.

 

She stirs, and he releases the curve of her jaw from his palm to allow her to sit up.

 

“We need to move,” she tells him through a wince, “Plank might be a professional, but if he found us, that means others can too.” 

 

Ben nods absently, eyes still tracing every line, every slightest discoloration on her face, certain there must be some other injury to her that the sheer relief of finding her alive is preventing him from seeing clearly. He lets his gaze linger an instant too long, and a bit of color floods the spaces between her freckles along the tops of her cheekbones.

 

“Ben?” she whispers, and he realizes with a jolt how close he’d been leaning in, their noses barely more than an inch apart. 

 

“You’re sure you’re alright to move?” he asks after sitting back, trying to cover up the awkwardness of that little moment with more pressing concerns.

 

Rey examines her shoulder and grimaces. “I’ll need to dress the wound, but we don’t have time for that right now. I don’t think we can waste any more time going from wreck to wreck trying to stay out of sight.” Ben watches, feeling the ghost of the pain in his ribs twinge sympathetically as she grits her teeth and pushes herself up to rest on one knee.

 

“What do you propose instead?” he asks grimly, sticking out a hand which Rey grasps gratefully, helping her up as he gets to his own feet. 

 

As she stands, he watches her eyes travel over her speeder and the crumpled body beside it. Her face doesn’t change, but he can hear the smallest waver in her voice, the uncertainty of whether she ought to be shocked or relieved at the sight of Sarco Plank’s body.

 

“Is he dead?” she asks him. 

 

Ben turns and surveys the gruesome proof of his outburst, the  _ rage _ that had filled him in the instant that he’d seen Rey hurt. “I don’t know,” he tells her truthfully. 

 

He refrains from adding,  _ I hope so. _

 

She nods once, accepting the information without visible judgement. He longs to reach out and brush her face again with his fingers to read her, to know if she’s disgusted, if she’s frightened by him, if she’s thankful, if she’s _ impressed.  _ A little thrill goes through him at that idea, one he can’t pretend to ignore.

 

“We can’t just sit here hoping someone on your side is coming to answer that bounty out for you,” she tells him, back to business. “I have to assume you came here in a Jedi ship, likely some kind of starfighter if you were piloting it alone. If we can find your crash site, we can put out a distress signal to your base requesting backup. If you had a droid with you it was probably too damaged by the crash to initiate a beacon for you.”

 

She actually sounds somewhat distressed by that prospect, as if just barely keeping herself from adding  _ “poor thing.” _

 

Ben drags in an exhausted breath. “I’m guessing a night’s sleep is off the table now.”

 

“At least  _ you _ got to lie down,” Rey says, grabbing the strap of her bag without lifting it to her shoulder before starting towards the speeder. 

 

The motion reminds Ben of yet another of his many failings in the past few hours. 

 

“I forgot to take down the kriffing tent,” he grits out abruptly. Directly after Rey had left to collect her thoughts in the wake of their argument, an unshakable feeling of dread had formed in the pit of his stomach, driving him to grab up as much of their supplies as he could and follow her down—not quite understanding how it was that he knew where she was going. 

 

At the time, grabbing her bag and the blaster had seemed like a stroke of brilliance on his part; but the thought of the tent, the bedroll, and the scruffy blanket inside waiting up in the storage room nearly a fifteen-minute trek away has him screwing his eyes shut briefly in pure frustration with himself.  

 

To her credit, Rey reacts with no disappointment, no ire—just a steadfast kind of resignation to their circumstances. “No time to go back for it,” she says as she disengages the electric shock on her speeder, picking up the spilled contents of the sliced cargo net with a sigh and moving to cram them into the compartment on the other side of the bike along with her satchel. “I guess you  _ will _ have to try and fit under my blanket after all.”

 

He figures that the safest reply to this is probably nothing.

 

“—And  _ don’t  _ think I’ve forgotten about our argument,” Rey says, suddenly whirling around to face him again with a bit of color back in her cheeks, as though realizing that they’d be back on the speeder together soon, much too close for comfort now that she knows her mind might as well be an open book to him at any given moment. “We’re putting an end to this whole ‘unintentional privacy invasion’ thing the minute we get a chance to stop and take stock for a moment.”

 

“Putting an end to it?” Ben asks, feeling his brows traveling upwards on his forehead. “How?”

 

She levels a rather cool look at him. “The only way there is to get better at something,” she says. “Practice.” 

 

About to swing a leg over the speeder, Rey freezes, her eyes catching on something just beyond Ben—her staff, lying abandoned in the sand a good twenty feet away. “Oh,  _ kriff,” _ she curses, moving to retrieve it in a stiff sort of way that betrays her exhaustion rather plainly, the sum of all her injuries from the day catching up with her.

 

Ben throws out a hand and beckons the thing towards him, causing her to freeze as she watches her staff fly smoothly into his hand. 

  
“Practice,” he agrees, trying not to search her face too greedily for approval as he delivers the obviously beloved weapon back into her arms. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, I'm thrilled because I did NOT expect to bang out another chapter so soon. But you know, I kind of needed it this week. Fights are new to me but pretty fun to write, and I'm excited to be moving closer and closer to a part I've been looking forward to writing for MONTHS now, and I feel like you guys might like it, too... c:


	9. Chapter 9

Rey can’t help but let her gaze wander to the curve of obsidian sky above them as the speeder skims over the desert sands once more. 

 

There  _ must _ be a ship up there, she thinks, one that accompanied or perhaps followed the stormtroopers’ vessel when reports of Ben’s failed captured reached the ears of whoever sent the soldiers after him in the first place. So why has the only attempt at recapturing him come  _ hours _ later at the hands of a bounty hunter simply looking to claim a reward?

 

“I heard that thought. And I don’t know either,” Ben tells her grimly, and Rey frowns.

 

“Thank you,” she says, a little stiffly—even though he’s only adhering to agreement they reached just before she allowed him to climb back onto the speeder for the first time after learning about his...condition. He was to tell her  _ every _ time a thought breached the apparently feeble barrier separating Ben from the inner workings of her mind.

 

At least she’s been able to determine that the situation isn’t quite as bad as she’d feared; he only seems to pick up on a few scattered, random thoughts here and there rather than having a constant stream of her consciousness running through his mind at all time, if she trusts that Ben is telling her the truth.

 

“Which I do, obviously. Believe you, I mean,” Rey blurts out.

 

“Okay,” Ben drawls behind her, pulling the word out somewhat sardonically. “Didn’t hear whatever prompted that, but...consider me reassured.”

 

“Oh, leave me alone,” Rey snaps. “ _ You _ try getting used to someone reading your bloody mind.” She glares into the wind for a moment before adding, “I was  _ thinking _ that it’s not  _ quite _ as bad as I thought, if you’re really telling every time you hear what I’m thinking. Which I believe that you are.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“I  _ know _ that you are,” Rey says, a sudden strange burst of mischievousness causing to continue speaking, “If you didn’t react to—well, never mind.” 

 

“What?” Ben asks, going almost comically tense behind her, which is exactly how she  _ really _ knows he’s telling the truth. “React to what?”

 

“Nothing,” Rey says lightly, in spite of the fact that her blaster wound has been stinging something fierce ever since they set off nearly half an hour ago, the cold, dry desert night air whipping harshly over it.  

 

Spying the familiar dune she’d been looking for, Rey begins to slow the speeder.

 

“Where are we going?” Ben asks, following Rey as she dismounts and creeps silently in the sand towards the crest of the dune in front of them, doubtlessly confused by her decision to stop in the middle of the featureless desert.

 

Pressing a finger to her lips, Rey carefully hunches down and crawls until the two of them can peer over the gently shifting ridge of sand.

 

In the valley at the bottom of the slope before them lies the AT AT she calls home. 

 

She almost smiles as Ben registers the sight in front of him, dropping abruptly down behind the crest again, chest pressing into the sand as though dodging an imagined blaster shot sailing over his head.

 

Rey observes carefully before daring to speak, but she can see no tracks in the sand around her home, nor any obvious signs of attackers lying in wait for them.

 

“Is this just crazy enough to work, or what?” she asks, a little delighted with her own logic—and perhaps just a little delirious from the pain in her arm. She falters when he doesn’t answer, taking in his position, cringing out of sight as though expecting to be detected any moment. 

 

He turns his head towards her, dark eyes glinting with uncertainty. “Walk me through it.” 

 

“Well...first of all, we know exactly  _ squat _ about where you crashed your ship, besides that you crawled here from roughly  _ that _ direction,” Rey says, gesturing an arm to the horizon south-east of them, indicating the approximate location of the tracks she’d been so  _ certain _ were fake, the ploy of some particularly wily thief. “We need to start from here if we’re to have any chance of actually finding the thing.”

 

“Second, if we’re being tracked, they’re going to follow us no matter  _ where _ we go, so we might as well make a useful stop. And anyone who  _ knows _ you’re with me and knows who I am probably has some idea of where I live. And they know  _ I _ know that. So if they aren’t flat-out tracking us, they wouldn’t expect us to come back to the place it would be easiest to find me! Would they?” Rey whispers, hearing the utter insanity of her own words but holding firm to them all the same. “I mean, there’s no one down there now.” 

 

“You’re certain?” he asks. With a tiny jerk of her head she urges him to look properly for himself. With exceeding care, he eases himself forward, peering down at the AT AT in its valley of darkness, casting gray shadows on the sand in the starlight.  

 

“Not everyone in Niima is a trained bounty hunter—I’d know if someone was in there,” she says. 

 

There’d been fewer and fewer intruders over the years as her favor with Unkar Plutt had grown—as well as her skill with her staff—but there had always been someone desperate or mean enough to try sticking their hands in their neighbor’s bowl. Looking down at her home from this distance, a succession of evenings plays through her mind; images of blatant footprints tearing up the terrain in front of her home, her few possessions scattered in the sand outside her door by uncaring hands looking for something of value.

 

How unreal it seems that she’d been standing at the bottom of this dune scarcely more than twenty-four hours ago, ready to briefly dull the sharp edge of her hunger, ready to rest her aching muscles among sparse comforts of her home. How tired she thought she’d been at the time. Maker, how that feeling paled in comparison to her exhaustion now. 

 

She turns her eyes on Ben once more, startled to find him watching her closely, as though tracking her slightest movement would be crucial to his survival. 

 

“Okay,” is all he says. The uncharacteristic lack of combativeness leaves her feeling curiously exposed. 

 

Sparing another few moments to scan to the horizon, the two of them carefully trek down the opposite side of the dune, half walking and half sliding all the way. 

 

The thought of that bottle of herbal pain remedy waiting inside is almost enough to tempt Rey to throw caution to the wind and dive straight through the entrance of the AT AT, but she lifts a finger to her lips, skirting around the perimeter of her home first and listening for any signs of intrusion she might have missed from afar—but as she’d expected, it’s clear.

 

Still, she shines the beam of her handlight around the interior of her home in a few efficient sweeps once she ducks inside. Then and only then does she fully relax for the moment, wasting no time in going for the spot where she keeps her medical supply kit, wincing as the fabric of her sleeve brushes the edges of her blaster burn when she reaches out for the little tin box.

 

It’s only when she turns to switch on one of her rigged overhead lights that she notices Ben sitting just inside the threshold of the entrance, shoulders hunched as if trying to take up as little space as possible—neither outside her home nor really managing to be fully inside it.  

 

A bizarre urge to laugh bubbles up in her chest; a slight, reluctant smile starting to lighten the edges of her words as she begins to tell him, “Ben, you can— _ ow.” _

 

A rush of pain shoots down her arm, apparently in protest at finding itself still in use so soon after suffering such an injury; but Rey finds herself gritting her teeth more in annoyance than anything. After eighteen years you’d think that her body would understand rest to be a luxury she can ill afford—yet it still insists on trying to slow her down. Although—granted she’s had some pretty nasty accidents over the years—she can’t say she’s actually ever been  _ shot _ before, so maybe she ought to cut herself some slack. 

 

She might, if only this desert would do her the same courtesy.

 

The roll of thin bandages she’d been extracting from the kit tumbles from her grasp, followed by the  _ clang _ of the container itself hitting the floor, ejecting its loosened lid and the items inside all around in a three-foot radius. Cursing, she starts to get stiffly to her knees—but before she can blink another pair of hands are there, piling her small collection of medical supplies back into the divided sections within the box.

 

“I’ve got it,” she tells him reflexively, grabbing the box back as he pauses to examine the small bottle of herbal pain remedy she’d given to him the night before. The quickness of her response is not lost on him, and she feels a dull blush warm her ears at his look of surprise. 

 

Maker, what’s  _ wrong _ with her? He’d only been trying to help—but just over twenty-four hours of companionship had not managed to erase that flash of panic at the idea of anyone touching her few possessions, nor the feeling that every move she made would be analyzed for signs of weakness and make her a target of someone else’s greed. 

 

It seems unlikely to her that she can explain all this to Ben in just a few short words, so instead she simply carries on, picking up her roll of bandages again in what she hopes seems like a very casual manner.

 

“Hand me that, will you?” Rey asks, jerking her chin to indicate the tiny brown bottle of pain reliever in his hands. 

 

Ben hands it over. “The bottle’s getting low. I’m sorry you had to waste some on me.”

 

Rey grimaces, examining the contents visible through the dark glass, only a small amount of the wood-like shavings lining the bottom of the bottle. “Had to happen sometime, I guess. I try to only use it for emergencies, but I’ve had it for—wow, going on three years now. Not easy to come by, this stuff.” 

 

“Expensive?” Ben asks, watching her as she palms a miniscule amount of the remedy and pops into her mouth, beginning to crush the tough grains between her teeth.

 

“I doubt I could afford it. But I don’t really know. This bottle was a...trade, of sorts.” Rey steels herself before reaching over to begin pulling the cloth from her arm wrap and tunic away from her wound. Still, she can’t help pulling in a sharp breath as her fingers accidentally graze the burnt skin.

 

It’s too dim inside the AT AT to really see his eyes too well, but Rey swears that Ben winces in tandem with her. “Can I help?” he asks.

 

“I can handle it,” she tells him, frowning in concentration as she continues to work at her sleeve. When she spares him a glance, she’s surprised to see that the look of pity she’d been prepared to dismiss isn’t actually there at all. Instead he watches her evenly, features set into a look of the same kind of grim determination she can feel on her own face, as though the wound belongs to them both.

 

“I know,” he says. “But you shouldn’t always have to.” 

 

There’s an unexpected softness to his voice that strikes a curious chord inside her chest—not just from the gentleness of it, but something about the way the quiet words brush the walls, settling down into the empty spaces around them. Proof that kindness had existed in this place at least once, for the span of a single sentence.

 

Slowly she extends the roll of bandages to him, heart beating curiously fast as she moves aside the medical kit in order to scoot closer, looking away with a sudden, inexplicable sheepishness as she presents her burned shoulder to him. She must’ve been six years old the last time someone else treated a wound for her—maybe even five.

 

For a few wordless moments, he works; the long fingers of one broad hand holding the fabric away from her burn, the other deftly wrapping the thin, sparse gauze around her arm. However worried she is about her own awkwardness, she takes comfort in the fact that the sound of his breathing is just a touch too loud to be casual.

 

“You’re nervous,” he comments after another minute, that low voice much closer to her ear now. 

 

“I thought we agreed you’re supposed to tell me when you’re in my head,” Rey says, cutting her eyes sharply at him.  

 

“I’m not,” he says. “You’re shaking.” 

 

Rey clamps her jaw shut firmly, briefly wondering if she’s always had this talent for inserting her foot into her mouth and just never noticed because she had no one to talk to before. 

 

“Yeah, well,” she replies in an awkwardly clipped voice, saying nothing more. She could try and defend herself from the implications of admitting to that—say that she’s cold, she’s tired, she’s beaten. But she doesn’t have the energy to lie right now.

 

“I just want to you to know...I won’t hurt you,” Ben says,  _ his _ voice now sounding somewhat strained as well. Oh, Maker. Here we go.

 

“It’s just a bandage. You have my full confidence,” Rey tells him, and okay, she  _ knows _ that’s not what he means, but it feels like she might actually evaporate from embarrassment right here in front of him if she lets him keep pursuing this conversation unhindered.

 

“I handled this poorly. I know I did,” he says, and Rey has no choice but to slowly turn her eyes on him, so ragged with regret is his voice. His gaze has been trained on her blaster wound, but he looks up suddenly as she faces him, his pale face etched with pain and yet something like gratefulness simmering behind the dark of his eyes, as though the mere act of looking at him abated some of his mistakes.

 

“I know I shouldn’t repeat anything—shouldn’t  _ talk  _ about anything I heard, but I know you were worried—I know how you kept fixating on me, on me touching you, on us being alone— _ please _ let me finish,” he begs as Rey begins to turn away, face absolutely flaming red, mouth opening to protest the necessity of this conversation. That grasping earnestness brings her up short, her silence giving him the cue he needs to continue. 

 

“It’s none of my business. Those were private thoughts. I  _ know _ that. But—gods, Rey. I’d never hurt you. I swear it.”

 

It takes a moment for the full meaning of his words to breach the space between them, thick with his desperation to be understood and her overwhelming humiliation. 

 

_ You were worried. _

 

_ I know I make you uncomfortable. _

 

_ I won’t hurt you. _

 

Ben witnessed himself through her thoughts—felt the pounding of her heart, the lingering of her eyes, the fidgeting of her body wherever the two of them happened to touch.

 

And thought that she was afraid of him. 

 

Maybe she ought to be grateful. If they could hone his ability enough so that he could control it at least a  _ little _ better, if she watched her thoughts around him, if he continued to announce his accidental presence in her mind—it was possible he’d never know the real reason she’d been so utterly mortified at the idea that  _ he _ , of all people, could read her thoughts. 

 

But that shame on his face. Maker, the  _ pain _ so obviously put there by the idea that she feared him, that she thought he might lay a hand on her without her permission, that she placed him among the leering, raucous men of Niima she’d spent her entire early adulthood avoiding. She couldn’t let it stay there.

 

She turns to face him, not caring that he’s still holding the tail of the bandage wrapped around her upper arm so that it stretches between them, a ghostly white connection in the dark.

 

“I never thought you would,” she says, and the visible relief that these words bring to him tugs at something funny inside her chest as she watches his whole body noticeably slacken, broad shoulders dropping tension as though taut strings supporting his body have suddenly been cut. 

 

Surprised by her own boldness, she takes the hand that had been keeping her sleeve away from her wound and brings it up just beside her own face, holding it there. His skin burns to the touch.

 

“Ben,” she says. “Listen  _ properly _ this time.”  And she lets his hand settle along the curve of her cheek. 

 

His eyes are wild, almost feverish the way they dart anxiously over her face, looking everywhere but directly into her eyes, trying and failing to avoid looking too eager. Words slip from his mouth, stuttering, stumbling. “I—how—I don’t know—”

 

“Try,” Rey tells him. 

 

**

 

It’s different this time. Until now, whenever he glimpsed the inside her mind without her knowledge, she felt nothing that might have given him away—not so much a tickle on the back of her neck, not the slightest inkling that she was being observed. She’d simply been... _ open _ for him, it seems. Almost projecting for him.

 

But not now. 

 

The gentle nudge begins between her eyes as his gaze finally rises to meets her, emboldened by her words. Listen.  _ Try.  _ A pressure builds and spreads inside her skull, not painful but neither is it quite pleasurable, and she sucks in a tiny gasp before she can stop herself.  _ Relax _ , she urges herself, but her body is suddenly tense and quivering and not quite fully her own.

 

“It hurts—?” he asks, his own breaths coming shallow and quick, eyes not moving from her own despite the naked uncertainty in them. He seems similarly paralyzed, as though channeling an electric current that is managing to pass through him into her, leaving them both unharmed so long as neither of them moves. But she feels his hand starting to pull away.

 

“No,” she manages to whisper, tightening her grasp on his hand and holding it more firmly against her cheek. “Keep going.”      __

 

He does, and she follows him under.

 

**

 

She’s eight, almost nine, and shucking caked layers of dirt off a compressor she pried from the console of a starfighter she’d unearthed all by herself after spying the very edge of the wing tip poking out the sand. A commotion draws her attention away from her work, and she lifts her head to see group of several human men emerging from the back of Unkar Plutt’s main tent, laughing a little too loudly, too roughly as they say their goodbyes, finished brokering whatever unsavory deal the junkboss has his thumb in this time. 

 

Pirates. 

 

Rey usually takes a naive liking to the smugglers who pass through Niima, hotshot pilots with modded-up ships who sometimes let her take a look at some of the outer mechanisms as long as she doesn’t touch anything. Already at this age she can fix anything she breaks, but they don’t know that. All they see is a dusty little kid looking for distractions.

 

But pirates always mean trouble.

 

Rey stares for too long, trying to figure out what it is that makes men laugh that way when they’re together, what makes their smiles so broad and yet so unsettling, and accidentally catches the eye of their leader. He’s shorter than his companions, but lean and muscular and possessed of a self-assured swagger none of the rest seem to be able pull off quite as well, despite their efforts to mimic it. Rey might think he was handsome if it weren’t for the unimpressive little beard on his chin and the mismatch of his clothes, ostentatious plum-purple leather jacket with dirty, nearly destroyed pants that suggest poor priorities and bad taste in equal measure. 

 

“Boys, boys,” he rasps in a voice burnt up by sin, “Keep it down. We’re disturbing the little  _ lady  _ here.” Four more pairs of eyes turn on her. 

 

“Isn’t this one a little too cute to be pushing sand around?” he asks as Unkar Plutt appears in the doorway behind them, perhaps wondering what has delayed their departure. The old woman seated beside her doesn’t look up, but Rey notices her gnarled hands pause in their work, as if listening. Her blood runs cold. The old-timers here sense trouble better than most. Rey’s eyes flick to the junkboss, uncertain of what the man is talking about, and yet sensing that she very much does not want Unkar to agree with him.

 

The massive Crolute looks her over once appraisingly before giving a guttural scoff. “Who can tell with you humans? You all look the same to me. No, the scavenger stays—she’ll make me more money here than whatever sack of coins you’ll try and trade for her.”

 

The men head back to their ship, but not before the captain smiles at Rey as he passes by her one last time, oil dripping from his words. “Too bad. Maybe in a few years.”

 

**

 

She’s nine and staying up well into the night, forcing her tired arms to move her quarterstaff through countless drills, striking at imaginary foes. People laughed the first time she came into town with her staff—until she broke the nose of the next person to try and take the scrap metal out of her hands. She savors the way the weapon becomes lighter in her hands each day, the way the sweat dampens her brow. She will never let  _ cute _ be the first thing anyone notices about her again.

 

**

 

Fifteen, and looking down at the little brown bottle the healer woman, Sanne, is pressing into her hand. 

 

“As a token of our thanks,” the older woman tells her, voice dropped to a whisper, mindful of the younger woman sitting in the corner, staring blankly at the wall. The skin around her left eye is beginning to color black and blue. “Are you certain you chased them all off? If one of them retaliates...”

 

Rey wipes some blood from the corner of her lip. “I can handle myself.”

 

**

 

Thirteen; the first time she sees a boy her own age. He’s some captain’s son, standing bored with with his arms folded by the entrance of the ship while his mother conducts business; golden haired and wearing boots that look brand new, a white linen shirt that’s actually  _ white _ . By now Rey has learned never to stare too long, but she finds herself inventing little reasons to walk by, each pass never quite sating her curiosity—how can be so  _ sulky _ , with clothes of that quality? She can’t understand it.

 

The boy frowns when he finally notices her. 

 

“I don’t have any money,” he sneers.

 

**

 

Ben’s head cradled in her hand as she carefully lifts the water to his lips. How surprised she’d been when she laced her fingers through his hair, as though forgetting that there could be anything soft about a person. 

 

**

 

Six years old. Her meager meal of crumbling veg meat is done, and her line of pencil marks documenting the days has finally reached the end of the wall. Tomorrow’s mark will need to begin the next line, just below the very first mark she ever made on the night she found this AT AT and hollowed it out for her own.

 

Already, she has grown out of crying.

 

**

 

Ben, close enough to count the freckles, holding her in his arms and lowering her to her feet so gently that she’d swear she was still floating.  

 

**

 

Fourteen and prying at the fuel compartment of a half-buried X-Wing with all her might—when it suddenly  _ gives _ , sending her flying backwards with a rather undignified yelp before landing hard on her ass in the sand. She lies there shocked for a moment before the first chuckle escapes from her lips almost accidentally, and then there she is, lying in the sand snorting helplessly with laughter at herself. It’s the only sound for miles.  

 

**

 

Ben’s face on the outskirts of Niima, the corner of his mouth maybe, maybe twitching.  _ Teasing _ .

 

**

 

Ten. Wearing her flight helmet and hurling rocks at the setting sun. She’s done every flight simulation in her program a hundred thousand times, until the animated starlines are all she sees when she closes her eyes. Can you die of boredom? 

 

**

 

Seven, and hunched in front of the rustbucket of an engine Unkar Plutt had set before her hours ago. She touches two cables together, each clutched in one of her tiny hands, and it sputters—sputters— _ roars  _ to life. 

 

“Good,” he grumbles, one of his rare statements untainted by insult, before ripping a ration packet down the center and tossing half a portion at her feet. “Now take it apart again, if you want the rest.”

 

**

 

Seventeen, lying in her hammock, the finger of one hand lightly tracing the delicate skin of her lips. Imagining.

 

**

 

Rey’s eyes follow a droplet of perspiration beading at his temple, edging down the side of his pale face to the flexing muscle in his jaw. This is too much, far beyond what she’d meant to show him.  They’re both quivering as if they are about to break. It occurs to her to end it—the bizarre sensation that she could push him out, somehow—but something stops her. 

 

Instead, she reaches out tentatively with her mind, following the flow of her own memories outside of herself. It stretches between them, delicate as a string.

 

Instead, she  _ pulls. _

 

**

 

Heart pounding as he shoves his way through the crowd in Niima.

 

Rey striding toward her speeder, golden in the early morning sun. 

 

Flashes of the desert on his hands and knees. 

 

Rey whirling on him, shoving him in the chest.  _ “You arse!”  _  Even wild with anger, her face is his greatest relief.

 

Sarco Plank’s body sailing through the air.

 

The feel of her hand lifting his head to drink.

 

The cold, cold hallway of his dream. 

 

Freckles on her nose. Her skinny wrists wrapped up in his hands. Her smile, sharp as a blade, aimed down at him from her perch on the ledge. Fingers ghosting across his skin where a bruise should be.  _ Hold on properly. _

 

Flashes of nothing. Of darkness. Gods, so much fear.

 

_ There is no concealing you from me for long. _

 

**

 

The coldness of that distant voice jolts them both out of their trance.

 

_ No, _ one of them whispers—or perhaps thinks—and Rey cannot tell who. She feels as though she can hear it inside Ben at the same time that she feels it come from herself.

 

But the images are gone, ripped away from her with a flourish that brings them both back to the present: on their knees, gasping, their joined hands now slick with sweat. Rey feels almost sick, unsure anymore of where the boundaries of her own consciousness lie. Her mind is a maze of mirrors reflecting the both of them endlessly. 

 

_ What is happening to me? _

 

_ What did we just do? _

 

She doesn’t know which of them thinks it. She  _ certainly _ doesn’t know the answer. All she knows is that she needs  _ more. _

  
Half-delirious, she throws her arms around his neck in an attempt to take it.   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was really excited about this one, and more than a little nervous because I decided to try a slightly more experimental style with the memory-sharing and beginnings of the force-bond. Comments and thoughts welcome and appreciated! I'm glad I could get this one up relatively soon as well, right before the holidays here in the US. As always, thank you for reading! c:


	10. Chapter 10

A kiss would’ve been easier to explain.

 

Instead, as Rey throws her arms around him, she finds her hands lacing into his hair—so much softer,  _ unfairly _ softer than her own—before dragging downward, the tips of her fingers raking down the sloping muscles that connect neck to shoulders, down between his shoulder blades, and then back up again to repeat the circuit. More than simply feeling him shudder with appreciation in her arms, she  _ feels _ the pressure in her own back, feels the relief of attention paid to tense, aching muscle and of dull, painful knots releasing.

 

_ Yes, _ Ben is thinking—or at least, that’s the general tenor of the groan of relief that resonates throughout him—so at least Rey knows she’s not unwelcome. 

 

She presses her face into the side of his neck, pushing their chests together as she moves her hands over him, overwhelmed by two sets of thoughts in her head, by a body outside her own that she can feel but can’t control. Stiff and uncomfortable, that sensation, like numbness in a limb that has fallen asleep. 

 

Perhaps it would be more bearable if only he didn’t feel so utterly  _ neglected _ , skin practically crying out for contact, for comforting touch. 

 

Echoes of his doubt pass through her mind. He knows nothing of his own upbringing; only that the Jedi are known for their odd, monk-like ways, removing young learners from the warmth of family, eschewing passion and attachment and the affection they bring. She feels his shame at wondering if he’s ever been touched like this before, or if he grew to be a man knowing nothing more than the occasional platonic fondness of a mentor. 

 

His neck warms beneath her cheek, mortified that he can’t withhold such personal concerns from her, and she nearly has to hold back a laugh. 

 

Here she is clinging to him, practically in his lap, and  _ he’s _ the one embarrassed.

 

Rey slides her hands up to cool the sides of his neck with her fingers, chilled from their expedition in the desert night air, and pushes a few disjointed images from her own life to him: alone in the AT AT, hugging her own arms tightly around herself to try and glean some comfort; running her fingers through her loose hair at the end of the day, eyes closed at the gentleness of her own touch; in Niima, sucking her own lip into her mouth as she watches some smuggler plant a kiss on a squealing cantina girl. 

 

All as if to say,  _ me too. _

 

She is perhaps a little too far gone to smile, but she releases a victorious little exhale of breath as she feels his reluctance abate, feels the warmth of his hands find the small of her back. She goes to move her hands back to his shoulders, intending to continue her ministrations to alleviate that awful, shared discomfort between them, but his thoughts draw her fingers back into his hair, and at once he is making the oddest sound, like a whimper desperately withheld. 

 

Useless, really, that effort. She  _ knows _ exactly how good it feels to him; feels the warm buzz of pleasure trailing down her neck. 

 

A curious sense of ego blooms between them in response to her thought, a flower on a vine that is slowly winding around them both. 

 

_ Oh yeah? _ he seems to be saying, before running his thumbs up the densely coiled muscles of her lower back through her tunic, digging into the tension she’s carried there for years, exacerbated by the violence of the day. Even as she gasps in relief, she notices the way his hands almost perfectly mimic her own motions, strumming the muscle in a circular pattern; the way the triumphant smirk she doesn’t need to  _ see _ to know it’s there is tinged with uncertainty on how to proceed.

 

Her observation of this detail does not go unnoticed. As if desperate to prove her wrong, he pulls her more tightly against him; one quick jerk forward so that she really  _ is _ in his lap now. For an instant, neither of them moves.

 

When she draws her head back to look at him, fingers still laced in his hair, the question is as plain on his face as it is in his mind.  _ Okay? _

 

They’re far beyond what started as simple mutual pain relief. There’s no use pretending otherwise. 

 

“Yes,” she whispers, the first word spoken aloud between them since forging this connection. She wants her affirmation to exist in the world outside them, tangible and real. Some proof that this isn’t some delusion, a symptom of her own madness.

 

“You’re not mad,” Ben whispers back, sounding for moment almost overjoyed, “You’re like me.” 

 

And something thrills between them at those words, a chorus of mingled fear and excitement. That vine creeping around them, ever tighter.

 

“The Force,” he goes on, sparing one of those hands from her lower back to fill his palm with the curve of her jaw. “You used it. I  _ felt _ it—the way it’s supposed to be.”

 

_ Not like in me _ , is how that sentences finishes in his head.

 

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Rey breathes, but he is defiant, filling her head with those dark places she’d seen inside him, the ones he brings forth by reaching too hard for any knowledge of himself, from where the Force lashes out of him. 

 

She takes his face in her hands, as if she can warm the cold places that way. “You were hurt. You will  _ heal.” _

 

He’s shaking his head back and forth, showing her Sarco again, letting her feel some of that darkness that had flowed through him, a power like white-hot pain you can pass on to the world. 

 

“I know it shouldn’t feel that way. It’s different with you. It’s— _ bright. _ ” He breaks off, eyes tracking every minute change of her face like lost knowledge unearthed from the sand. “I can feel it in you.”

 

“It’s in  _ you, _ too,” Rey insists, her thumb tracing the skin below his cheekbone. “You were angry. Afraid. Those are  _ normal _ emotions, Force user or not.”

 

Ben’s eyes close at her touch, but a bitter grimace twists his mouth.

 

“Not to the Jedi,” he murmurs. “I know that much. I’m afraid…” he pauses, eyes still closed, “...I’m afraid that I might not have been a very good one.”

 

“You’re wrong,” she tells him fiercely, giving him a little shake that forces him to open his eyes. “I’ve heard the stories—dark and light sides of the Force, as if they’re  _ teams _ you can pick. The whole galaxy isn’t divided into Jedi and darksiders. People are more complicated than that. Everyone has dark in them.” 

 

“Not you,” he whispers. “What I felt in you, it was so  _ pure _ —”

 

“Don’t,” she whispers back, harshly enough to jolt the reverence from his gaze. “Don’t put me on that pedestal. You think I’ve never been driven by anger? Fear? After what I showed you?”

 

She floods a memory across the connection to him, the sunset-red of evening sky matching the crimson staining her knuckles as she pummels them down on the man she has pinned, her fists pounding flesh in a body that has long since gone limp, barely dragging in gurgling breaths beneath her. She started off shouting  _ something _ at him, something that devolves into guttural cries with each hit. Everything is red; her vision, his face, her hands. And part of her relishes it. 

 

“He was in the group attacking that woman,” Ben says, following the thread of her thoughts. “You saved her.”

 

“Did I say I regret it?” Rey meets his eyes firmly. “Sarco Plank attacked me. You saved me. It’s about how you  _ use  _ it. It’s about— _ balance.” _

 

“So you think it’s a coincidence that there’s a bounty for my arrest? That half the galaxy is apparently looking for me?” His tone is not unkind, but the doubt is plain both in his mind and on his face. _ He’d be hopeless at gambling, _ Rey can’t help but think, and even now the quick flare of annoyance she feels from him almost coaxes a smile from her.  

 

“We don’t know what happened,” she says. “And I’ll remind you that the troops who came after us were those Imperial fanatics—hardly people I’d expect to be working in conjunction with the Jedi.” 

 

For the moment, he is silent. “That voice,” he says, finally. “In my dream.” So quietly, as if afraid speaking of it will invoke the thing itself. Rey can’t repress a shiver as the words replay in his head.

 

_ There is no concealing you from me for long. _

 

“I don’t know,” Rey tells him. “A memory. A nightmare, maybe. Either way, it doesn’t come from  _ you.” _

 

Rey can feel that her words have calmed him for the time being, at least assured him that not  _ every _ direction conceals an enemy lying in wait; for now, this de-escalation from full-on panic to spiritual unrest will have to do. 

 

Unfortunately, this moment is enough for Rey to realize just how long the two of them have been discussing life and death matters with her quite unabashedly  _ sitting in his lap. _

 

But before she can make the slightest move to back away from him—yes, he’s seen into her very psyche at this point, but old habits die hard—one of those long arms bands like steel around her lower back again.

 

“Don’t?” he breathes, just like that. A question. This time when the blood flushes her cheeks, she  _ knows _ he sees it, because she hears the thoughts that flood his head, which only cause her to blush more deeply. She sees herself again, glancing at him from the corner of her eye on the outskirts of Niima. Smiling down at him from the ledge inside the  _ Ravager.  _ Her face inches from his, much like it is now, bathed in the glow of her handlight and examining the place where a bruise ought to be.  __

 

More disarming is the lack of expectation behind these thoughts, behind this request. All her life she has only known men to  _ want _ things, to demand them, to take them when they aren’t freely given. 

 

At her back, that circling hand finds an edge of cloth, toys with with the fraying hem. But she can’t help it—her heart clenches when his fingers find the skin beneath. Not in fear of  _ him _ , but gods, it’s all just so much for one day, so many leaps and jumps forward from the drought of affection that has defined her life to this point. No embraces, no pats on the back, no friendly handshakes. Not so much as a gentle touch to the shoulder, before him. 

 

“Ben. Stop.” She whispers the words to him, although his hand has already stilled. She knows he’s felt her trepidation, heard the worry of her thoughts, and the hand withdraws and settles back on top of the fabric covering her waist. 

 

She watches his face for disappointment, perhaps for anger—but even as she sifts through the feelings pouring across their connection, there’s nothing there but a kind of unwavering obedience, a realization of  _ control  _ over him that hits her blood like alcohol.  _ Anything you say, I’ll do it, anything you want, anything, anything. _

 

She pulls back from his mind at once, overwhelmed. Ben’s face remains unchanged, visibly unembarrassed by her discovery. His expression is serious, eyes half-lidded, as though daring her to doubt him. 

 

It’s foolish she supposes, this—this— _ girlish _ shyness she’s somehow maintained out here in the desert, but the mere idea of hands beneath her clothes, when she’s never even been  _ kissed _ —

 

Blood rushes into her face as she watches his eyes drop to her lips. A question.  _ Anything you want. _

 

But it’s as if her jaw is welded shut, something deep within her objecting to this bizarre level of devotion from him. He’s been almost completely dependent on her since the moment she found him at her door, forced to rely on her in the absence of any knowledge about this planet, about his injuries, about  _ himself.  _ And now, forced to share this most personal part of themselves with each other, every thought, every sensation—of  _ course _ he’s become attached to her. 

 

But would he still want this, if he had his memories? Would he regret it, if he ever got them back? Her stomach turns.

 

“I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t do that to you.”

 

“Do  _ what _ to me?” Ben demands. He looks stricken, and she winces at the panic she feels in him, the shock of a comfort being suddenly ripped away. But he hears the answer in her mind before she can even think to form the words on her lips.

 

“—Take  _ advantage _ of me?” he blurts out, as though he can change her mind by racing out in front of her doubts and heading them off. “I’m not  _ helpless _ , I—I’m not a  _ child—” _

 

“And what  _ is _ your age?” she counters. “Twenty-five? Thirty? An impressively fit forty?”

 

“I’m not _ forty,”  _ he snaps, although she notes the reluctant pang of doubt at his own words, as well as the unmistakable twinge that come with a hit to the ego, and stars, she’d laugh if rejecting him didn’t feel so much like yanking her own heart loose. A time like this, and he somehow manages to be  _ vain. _ “Kriff, does it really matter?”

 

“Not to me,” she says. “But maybe it would to you, if you had your memories back. You don’t know.”

 

He frowns. “I have amnesia. That doesn’t make me a  _ vegetable. _ ”

 

“What if it was me who’d lost my memories?” Rey shoots back, pushing the images into his mind before he can argue.

 

What  _ if _ it were her, in his place? Alone on a strange planet. Injured. Afraid. Wholly dependent on the first person to come to her aid. Would she be so frightened, so grateful to her rescuer that she’d offer to ease their loneliness? Would it be right of them to go along with it, to ask for her affection knowing she had no way of evaluating this situation against previous experiences? No way of knowing how she might  _ normally _ behave? No ability to remember other people in her life? 

 

Of course, there  _ are  _ no other people in her life. But theoretically.

 

Ben stares back at her, jaw slightly slackened. “That’s different.” 

 

“Why?” Rey demands. “Because I’m younger? Because you’re a man?”

 

He says nothing, looks at her as though trying to burn a reasonable answer into her with his gaze—but even the swirl of his thoughts is too indecisive to pluck an answer from. 

 

Even so, he releases his grip on her, allowing her to gently slide backwards off his lap. Rey feels the intensity of their connection fade just the slightest bit as they part, the accuracy of their insight into each other somewhat dulled.  

 

Desperate to distract herself from how utterly  _ wrong  _ it feels to let go of him, to let their moment of closeness slide away, she scoops up the forgotten medical supplies beside them.

 

“We should get going. Grab anything that looks useful that we can still fit in my bag,” she instructs him briskly, busying herself with tucking in the end of her freshly-applied bandage so that it no longer dangles freely from her arm. She’s well aware of how ridiculous she sounds, tossing out chores as Ben sits motionless in front of her, his gaze simmering in the dark. 

 

She pushes on, flustered but unwilling to back down. “All we know about the location of your ship besides the rough direction you came from is that it was close enough for you not to die before making it to my door.”

 

Hesitantly, she lets her eyes roam over his face once more. His recovery had been so miraculously fast that she’d nearly forgotten how bad he’d looked when she’d first found him; battered, unconscious, skin blistered red from the sun where it wasn’t caked in blood and sand. He turns his face away almost self consciously under her scrutiny, feeling her eyes, her memories. Rey’s fingers twitch with the urge to reach out and stop him. But she doesn’t.

 

“After you crashed,” she begins more gently now, “Do you have any idea how long you were out there? Do you remember the sun setting at any point? I can’t imagine surviving the temp drop at night on top of your injuries, but all things considered you might’ve been able to go two, maybe three days without water. How long did it feel?”  

 

It’s odd, feeling Ben rally himself to answer before the words even leave his mouth. She recalls a choking thirst, the searing burn of the sun that she knows aren’t quite her own, despite her own missteps across the brutal desert years.

 

“Longer,” he says, quietly.  

 

But as the memories flow out of him, Rey begins to piece together a vague kind of timeline, snippets of information between the flashes of pain and thirst and misery. She sees smoke against the pastels of dawn, sand stained pale blue by fading starlight; that same sand ignited into fine, ever-burning embers by the fire of the sun; a sun that rises at his back and looms above as if to judge all beneath; a sun that deems him wanting and circles down, a predator nestling among the dunes, awaiting the arrival of its prey. 

 

But Ben did not go obediently to his death. No, he zigged and zagged to evade his would-be killer, never keeping to a straight path for too long. He hid  _ himself _ among those same dunes, among their rare, scattered shadows—and outlasted the sun.

 

One day’s journey on foot.  _ One. _ Rey can hardly believe their luck.   

 

Seizing her satchel with renewed vigor, she turns to her shelf of assorted tools and spare junk parts, piling items in almost at random. “Come on,” she commands him breathlessly, “A day’s walk is a breeze on the speeder—but I’ve got a bad feeling that we’re running out of time.”

 

Ben pushes slowly to his feet, unfurling himself carefully as if uncertain he’ll fit without knocking something over. A valid concern, because he does so almost immediately. His head bumps one of the handlights suspended along the ceiling of her space, causing the fasteners holding that section to drop and the light to come swinging down on its wire. Ben curses, one hand pressed to the top of his head, and Rey turns—but the comment dies on her lips as she take in the beam of light now aimed harshly at one wall rather than diffused above the entire space.

 

There are thousands of marks on her wall. Four thousand, seven hundred and seventeen to be exact. One mark for every day since she’d found this AT AT and made it her home twelve years and three hundred and thirty-seven days ago. One mark every evening, before sundown. One mark every day since was nearly six years old. 

 

Rey screws up her mouth. She’s missed today, for certain. Day number four thousand, seven hundred and eighteen. It’s not the first time she’s been away from the her home overnight and had to wait record them on her wall after the fact.

 

But...did she mark the day before today? The evening she found Ben? 

 

She  _ always _ made her mark after arriving home, right before the meager scraps of a meal she called dinner, when she could be fairly confident that she’d survived all the day had to offer. He’d interrupted that routine. But in all the excitement of hauling him inside, of trying to rustle up food and water and supplies, she can easily see herself reaching for the pencil automatically, etching her mark without a second thought. 

 

But she doesn’t know. She  _ doesn’t know. _

 

“Rey?” Ben probes cautiously, the worry in his voice forcing her to tear her eyes from the rows of neat pencil marks etched onto the metal. She feels him in her head, trying to make sense of the look on her face. But even  _ she _ isn’t sure what’s going on in there. 

 

Twelve years, three hundred and thirty-eight days. Thirty-eight- _ ish. _ Roughly thirty-eight. Something generally in that area. The strangest urge to laugh is bubbling up in her chest, at how important maintaining that count has been up until this moment. At how instantly her idea of  _ important _ can change. 

 

Twelve years, three hundred and thirty- _ something  _ days. 

 

“It doesn’t matter.” She feels the words leave her mouth, unsure even as it’s happening whether she’s addressing Ben or herself. “Let’s go.”

 

Letting her eyes flick upwards, she takes in some of her low-hanging supplies strung from the ceiling, the bits of metal jutting out high above her own head that she’s never had much cause to pay attention to. “And watch your head.”

 

**

 

The last shaft of light from the corridor disappears as the doors slide shut with a strangely muted  _ hiss _ . For such an enormous room, the sound behaves oddly—even the footsteps of the man striding towards the dais in the center of the chamber are quiet, somehow swallowed up by what seems like it ought to be an echoing, cavernous space. 

 

Though the rows of seating that flank the polished obsidian walkway are empty, the silence is almost a presence itself, a reverent hush in deference to the enormous hologram emitting a soft blue-tinted glow. A titan upon a throne.

 

The man halts his steps neatly in the center of the circular platform before the dais; the place where sins are judged, where fates are decided, where mercy is rarely granted. 

 

“Punctual, as always,” the titan’s voice echoes finally, a rumble from the deep. “What have you to report?”

 

“The soldiers were called back and the deployment shuttle returned to the  _ Finalizer _ approximately two hours ago, after aborting their sweep of the the desert outpost per your orders. We remain in orbit of the planet Jakku, awaiting further instruction.”

 

A low growl of what might be some approximation of approval emanates from the monstrous figure. “And yet I sense confusion in you, General.”

 

A moment of hesitation. “It is not my place to question your orders, Supreme Leader.” 

 

“But you do not understand them.”

 

The General tips up a strong chin to look upon his superior, pale face washed with blue in the dark. “My men could have captured the target, had they not been called back. My only concern is completing your objectives—” 

 

“This is not a matter for your ego, General,” the Supreme Leader’s voice booms. “New information has come to light, requiring a more... _ delicate _ touch. The Jedi Solo is not a target, not  _ eluding _ us as we feared. He has simply lost his way. Is that clear?”

 

“Understood. And what of the girl he was seen with?”

 

“She is lost as well,” the echoing voice decrees, filling the empty spaces of the room—the only sound permitted such dominance. “Go. Show them the way.” 

 

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” the General replies, and the hologram flickers out of existence, leaving only polished darkness behind.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2016 is really kicking the shit out of us, isn't it? Sorry I couldn't get this up before the holidays!


End file.
